Nvidia control panel crashes

[shinji257]

I have tried both 163.71 and 169.01 drivers. Installed both using the modded inf. When I try to load the control panel it crashes right away. 94.22 works quite happy on my system however Gears of War requires 163.44 or newer.

System specs: Dell Insprion E1705 with Geforce Go 7900 GS and Windows XP SP2

Please help me find drivers that work well and where the control panel applet does not crash when you try to load it.

BTW, I have already tried uninstalling, running driver sweeper before reboot, reboot and reinstall to no avail.

P.S. -The error I get is "NVIDIA Control Panel Application, 1.5.30.31 has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for any inconvenience." -- looks like standard windows crash. It is followed by the message "The instruction at "0x00401b75" referenced memory at "0x0000001c". The memory could not be "read""

EDIT: I just found out how to enable the classic menu. This will have pretty much all of the settings including the smart dimmer. You will need to change a registry entry so before you get started please backup your registry. The classic UI does not crash on my machine. :)

Locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NvCplApi\Policies

Now then here are 2 keys that will be of importance. Only the first one is required. I will describe each.

Key Type: DWORD

Key Name: ContextUIPolicy

Known Possible Values: 1 (Classic UI), 2 (Modern UI)

Description: Change this value to the UI you wish to use. This will allow you to switch to the classic one if the Modern one does not work on your computer (like mine).

Key Type: DWORD

Key Name: SedonaDisable

Known Possible Values: 2 (enable UI switch)

Description: Creating and setting this key to a value of 2 will enable the ability to switch UI within the control panel applet. If this key is missing then the option to switch between them will also be missing.

Edited December 10, 2007 by shinji257