Nvidia GT640 0x0000000B Service Error Arghh

Look out, there's a Blue Screen of Death Ahead!

So everyone,

what's the first thing we get told to do when we have a blue screen of death or error with a graphics card?

What's that?

Aha, yes, you at the back, update your drivers. And if the cause of the blue screen is you updating the drivers but you have to update them to fix another issue?

No?

Me, either.

I have a low to middle power PC in the living room for the family to play mame, emulators and some steam / big fish stuff on the TV. It's running Windows 7 64 Ultimate, 4GB of RAM with an over clocked Gigabyte 640GT. It's not going to set the world on fire for gaming and it wont touch some AAA games but that's not why it's there. I can kick back and play Outrun, Metal Slug or bash away at Portal etc. using either an Xbox 360 controller or the wireless mouse, keyboard.

Recently some software started to need an updated graphics driver so I updated it from Nvidia.

And the fun started.

One of my sons favourites is Sonic All Star Racing Transformed and after the graphics driver update it wouldn't start. Any attempt blue screened with a service error (0x0000000B). Rolling the driver back wasn't going to help in this case as other things would then break so I began diagnostics. I checked for patches on windows and drivers all was up to date, no malware or spyware. Nothing new installed (bar a Microsoft cordless keyboard / mouse dongle replacing my old Logitech one which finally died).

I then turned off the over clocking on the 640, no joy. Even under clocking it didn't help.

So I turned to Steam (through which the game was bought) and backed up the game content, deleted it and re-downloaded it. Nada, same error.

Finally I unplugged the USB sound card (used to get 5.1 as the PC doesn't have discrete 5.1 on it and I failed to get optical 5.1 working from Steam games) and bingo, no blue screen. Even over clocking the card again everything stayed stable.

Plugging the USB back in and bang, back to the blue screen. So I uninstalled the driver and then plugged the card back in, the driver reinstalled and I ran the game. Blue screen again.

Mmmm.

Finally I uninstalled the card, changed the USB socket it was plugged into and let the drivers reinstall.

No blue screen.

I can only assume this is an IRQ or similar conflict but running the sound card from this USB works, the original fails every time.

As a bonus I finally sorted low volume levels and stereo separation on the usb soundcard and the new GT640 drivers have finally resolved some screen tearing I was having on Sonic (for reference turn on the graphics card vsync and triple buffering and turn off vsync in the game configuration).