Windows XP Service Pack 2 stops Torque!

#21 Every copy of windows since 95 has shipped (and still does, including xp) with a software OpenGL 1.1 implementation. Matter of fact, it's the one you link against, and that's why we have so much extensions stuff to deal with on windows, unless you use updated headers, etc.
It's also the one you fallback on when stuff isn't implemented in your hw's ICD driver. MESA does a way better job at software OGL, but it doesn't ship with windows :)
Also, if your OpenGL drivers are the least little bit problematic, which was the case with the initial release of XP and the so called WHQL drivers it shipped with, you'll find using the software fallback a lot more.
This is an entirely transparent process for the user.

Granted, WHQL rated drivers have come a long way, and this is nowhere near the problem it use to be.
Still, if you're into 3d gaming or 3d game dev, you should never use the drivers from Windows Updates, and at least get the drivers from your card manufacturer, if not the reference drivers from your GPU chipset manufacturer.

#22 I have also been seeing some major crashes that seem to have gotten worse since SP pack 2. Does anyone have a final word on this question? (I thought my video card was questionable, but I went ahead and replaced it, without any benefit.)

#23 Wierdly enough there are very few things that XP will not recover from. As you have probably noticed, one of these things is the graphics driver as this directly acesses the hardware and renders all gui components. As a result of this windows will reset if the graphics driver stops responding for any reason what so ever (even if it simply takes too many cycles to respond!)

ATI build in some recovery code into their newer drivers once it became common knowledge i.e. NVidia and ATI drivers are the primary cause of XP crash syndrome.

So if you've installed service pack 2 and have lots of crashes, chances are you are running the latest NVidia drivers and the new sp2 security features don't like what it thinks they are trying to do to the system. So XP terminates them and stupidly causes itself to reset in the process.

Scenario goes something like this

XP : "oh he's launching mega blob doom better hand over to directx"

Gamer happily plays for a few minutes then

Graphics Driver : "Ah a memory gobbling texture request better grab the data."

XP : "Oi program what you gobbling that memory for. Better kill your sorry ass.....hmmm where's the graphics driver gone...better reset and tell user we have a mysterious error on our hands..."

Graphics driver : "Gack I've been killed (if it's an ATI driver then) oi user do you want me to recover myself? (if Nvidia) gack here have a blue screen of death mate."

XP : "ho hum better restart cos I have no graphics driver to render my beautiful features.....blorrrrkkkkkkk plink"


Ok so it's slightly more complex than that but this is the gist of the matter an over zealous security core. Way to go micro$oft!!

#24 @peter

This sounds very similar to my situation. I've gone ahead and uninstalled service pack 2 for the moment, but perhaps there is a less drastic solution? I have an NVidia card, and some of the messages I was getting sounded very much like what you are describing. (I.e. the system reporting that the driver has not responded, and then crashing, follow by trashed video drivers, and finally I seem to have a corrupted texture file as well. (Also some fun hard disk errors as well.))

#25 Yup, same exact thing here.

BTW, Peter, you had me laughing with that scenario walk through. That is the same way I explain things to my corporate users except I add different voices for each component... LOL.

#26 In case anyone is curious, It turns out that I had a bad DIMM on my machine as well, so I'm not sure how much to blame SP 2 for my troubles, and how much to blame the DIMM. I'm not going to reinstall SP 2 anyway.