Latest Catalyst Control Center & Radeon Drivers - Beware

dementedcanuck@gmail.com

Had a pop-up for Catalyst Control Centre 2 days ago to update. I let it download and auto-update. The Software page in Catalyst indicated level 12.3 (seems it was really 12.2 WQHL level).

A while later - pop-up from Windows Action Centre - no ant-virus or firewall running. Tried to open BitDefender - icon on the task bar was greyed out and BD was telling me it was not working and I needed to re-boot to fix it. Started to investigate the event logs - but crashed with a BSOD.

Had another couple of BSOD's - traced it to the 8.95 level of the grapic driver that came with Catalyst. Also had a few more BD crashes.

Picked the last Windows Restore Point before the Catalyst update - everything seemed to go OK. Message on the re-start that the restore did not work (I do think some stuff did get backed out). The graphics driver was still at 8.95 - couple more BSOD's before I managed to get Device Manager to roll back to previous driver. No problems since then.

Just checked the AMD site - 12.2 is listed as the latest version with the 8.95 driver. Catalyst tells me I am at 12.1 (on the Software tab) with the 8.93 driver (That is why I suspect that part of Catalyst was restored). However if I click Software Update it says I am on 12.3 !!!

I am stable for now .... so I am going to leave it alone. Will be doing a fresh install soon anyway.

AMD is scrambling to get decent WQHL drivers out for all the driver issues with the 7000 cards and it looks like some other things are getting broken along the way. It WAS NOT sociable with BitDefender 2012 (Total Security) - I have had no issues major issues with 2012. I have a very stable set-up and the BSOD's were NOT appreciated.

Another issue with the 8.95 driver - on a re-boot the screen went black after entering password - just the mouse. Cntl-Alt-Del worked to bring up task manager - from what I could determine there appeared to be some kind of serialization of the start-up programs & services. I have a 6 core with hyper threading and start-up is normally very fast even with all that I load. But it was processing the start-up programs and services serially. Once I rolled back the graphics driver went back to normal.

Just beware of the latest drivers for the AMD/ATI cards ......

Cheers

Ross

rootkit

Hello Ross

Could you please send me the minidumps from Windows folder to check them out?

Also, have you tried to manually remove the old version of the driver and install the new one?

Take care.