New ATI Card Causes Taskbar to Disappear

[EricG]

Hi All,

My Nvidia 6800 GT melted this weekend, so I bought an ATI Radeon HD 3650 to
replace it - it's hard to find an AGP card these days, and that was what Best
Buy had on hand!

I had no problems installing the card or the new drivers and software, but
when I rebooted my system and Windows came up, the taskbar at the bottom of
the screen was missing - there was nothing but a black empty space in its
place. When I run any full screen program and then quit it, that black space
is replaced by whatever was in the program's window, but the taskbar doesn't
come back.

I'm running Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002 SP3 on a Sony VAIO 2.8 GHz
Pentium HT with 1.5 GB of RAM.

If you have any suggestions for fixing this or any clues, I would appreciate
a response.

Thanks,

Eric

 

[Ian D]

Hi All,

My Nvidia 6800 GT melted this weekend, so I bought an ATI Radeon HD 3650
to
replace it - it's hard to find an AGP card these days, and that was what
Best
Buy had on hand!

I had no problems installing the card or the new drivers and software, but
when I rebooted my system and Windows came up, the taskbar at the bottom
of
the screen was missing - there was nothing but a black empty space in its
place. When I run any full screen program and then quit it, that black
space
is replaced by whatever was in the program's window, but the taskbar
doesn't
come back.

I'm running Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002 SP3 on a Sony VAIO 2.8
GHz
Pentium HT with 1.5 GB of RAM.

If you have any suggestions for fixing this or any clues, I would
appreciate
a response.

Thanks,

Eric

I assume you unistalled the nVidia drivers. You may have to do
a search and destroy mission to clean remnants of the nVidia
drivers from your registry. Are the ATI drivers the latest, or
what came with the card? If you downloaded the latest version,
uninstall it and try the driver on the card's CD, or vice versa.

 

[Paul]

I assume you unistalled the nVidia drivers. You may have to do
a search and destroy mission to clean remnants of the nVidia
drivers from your registry. Are the ATI drivers the latest, or
what came with the card? If you downloaded the latest version,
uninstall it and try the driver on the card's CD, or vice versa.

One of the problems with ATI AGP cards, is where to get drivers. The
best place to look, is look at the review comments for a card, to
see where the "best" drivers are located. For some AGP cards, there
have been particular driver sources which are better than others.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16814102814

For example, there is a driver sitting here, but no way to predict
what it might fix. Or whether it would work any better. Even the
manufacturer who made the card, could have a driver sitting on their
site, which works better than some of the others. AGP just
doesn't seem to be "mainstream" enough, to trust you can take
a driver from the main AMD/ATI download and expect it to work.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/CatalystAGPHotfix.aspx

Paul

 

[EricG]

I did uninstall the Nvidia drivers, but I'll go and look around to see if
there are any remnants left.

First I tried the drivers that came on the CD with the card. When I saw the
weird behavior, I downloaded the "latest" from the ATI web site. Same
problem.

Thanks for the inputs. I'll keep trying things. May have to invest in a
good registry cleaner.

Eric

 

[Ian D]

I did uninstall the Nvidia drivers, but I'll go and look around to see if
there are any remnants left.

First I tried the drivers that came on the CD with the card. When I saw
the
weird behavior, I downloaded the "latest" from the ATI web site. Same
problem.

Thanks for the inputs. I'll keep trying things. May have to invest in a
good registry cleaner.

Eric


:

Don't get a registry cleaner. The best way is to backup your
registry, then do it yourself. It looks like what's happening is
that the taskbar area of the screen is not updating, but displaying
what should have been displayed in the previous window. It is
most likely a driver issue. What happens if you go to command
prompt full screen, then back to the desktop? I assume it would
display a black bar.

I just thought of this. What happens if you uninstall the ATI drivers,
and just use the default XP video drivers. If this works, you won't
have video acceleration, so drag the task bar to the right of the
screen, then reinstall the ATI drivers. This way you'll at least have
the task bar available with the ATI drivers.

 

[SC Tom]

I did uninstall the Nvidia drivers, but I'll go and look around to see if
there are any remnants left.

First I tried the drivers that came on the CD with the card. When I saw
the
weird behavior, I downloaded the "latest" from the ATI web site. Same
problem.

Thanks for the inputs. I'll keep trying things. May have to invest in a
good registry cleaner.

Eric

To add to what Ian D posted, the easiest way to get new video drivers to
work is to uninstall the old ones and reboot. If the New Hardware wizard
starts, just close it for now. Check your display settings and use the
native VGA mode. Reboot. If the New Hardware wizard starts again, close it.
Put the ATI disk that came with the video card in and install the drivers.
That should take care of any video issues you were having.

SC Tom

 

[smlunatick]

I did uninstall the Nvidia drivers, but I'll go and look around to see if
there are any remnants left.

First I tried the drivers that came on the CD with the card.  When I saw the
weird behavior, I downloaded the "latest" from the ATI web site.  Same
problem.

Thanks for the inputs.  I'll keep trying things.  May have to invest in a
good registry cleaner.

Eric

Head over to www.gutu3d.com and get Driver Sweeper. Several
manufacturers tend to not correctly clear out their driver files /
settings and others have made a complete driver scrubber software.

As for ATi, it seem that the Catalyst drivers / Control Panel software
tend to require a specific .Net level. You must have every version of
the .Net and not just the "highest" version as these are not
cumulative.