ATI AIW 7500 & USB Conflicts -- Screen Flashes

[kpkilburn]

Since my video card problems surface when I'm editing video, I posted here.

I appreciate any help you can offer.

Background:

I have an ATI AIW 7500 video card and it has worked fine until I installed a USB 2.0 card in my computer (for my ADSL).

Originally, everything worked fine -- Video Card USB, etc. I reloaded the entire system because I had a dual boot 98 and XP system. The video card and USB 2.0 cards were both upgrades.

Here are the symptoms:

Whenever I access any folder that contains video and my settings are for "thumbnails", the screen blanks out 2 or 3 times before finally stablizing. It doest the same thing whenever I start Media Player, but it's less obvious.

The big problem comes in whenever I use something like a video editor or Adobe After Effects. When I bring up a preview window or drag video into the editing bar, the screen takes literally about 1 to 2 minutes (blanking in and out the whole time) to settle down. The screen also blanks out whenever the editing program "refreshes" the display.

I have uninstalled the card and reinstalled the drivers. I just downloaded the new Catalyst drivers and will install them as soon as I'm finished here. I doubt they'll resolve the problem.

Here's what I suspect:

Although WinXP allows IRQ sharing, I think that my USB 2.0 (which has my ADSL MODEM attached) is bogging down IRQ 10.

IRQ 10 has the following:

NEC PCI to USB Open Host Controller
AIW Radeon 7500
Texas Instruments OHCI Complient IEEE 1394 Host Controller

There are no indications of conflicts in the system, but I suspect that these devices don't like to be shared. When I connect my DVD+R to the same USB 2.0 and try to use it while running the ADSL, it fails and both stop functioning.

I think the system was OK when I upgraded bit-by-bit. When I did the reload though, XP readjusted ALL of the IRQs and decided to share ones that weren't shared before.

Any ideas? Thanks!

[lordsmurf]

Try another brand of USB card.

[kpkilburn]

That's an option... just not the first.

I finally found some info that said DO NOT share the AGP slot with a USB card, so I'll try that option first.

I was hoping that someone had experienced the same problem. I know I can fix it, but time is a little limited right now and I'd like to take the path of least resistance so to speak.

[fourthquark]

If swapping slots for the USB2.0 card doesn't solve your problem, try a stepwise reduction in your graphics card's hardware acceleration settings until the problem disappears. If this process produces a stable system and you can live with the reduced performance, your problem is solved. Otherwise you will need to change the USB2.0 card or possibly even the graphics card.

[Richard_G]

Otherwise you will need to change the USB2.0 card or possibly even the graphics card.

But it would probably be cheaper to change the motherboard for one with USB2 already on it.......

[kpkilburn]

I finally resolved the problem. It was a driver issue. Sounds obvious now, but I had uninstalled/re-installed the driver numerous times before.

I removed ALL of the other components -- USB 2.0 card, NIC, etc. and still had the same problem. I finally just reloaded the system from scratch and the video worked fine.

I then reinstalled the cards one-by-one making sure that they worked each time. The system works fine now, even with the sharing of IRQ 16.

I'm assuming that somewhere along the loading/unloading of things, the video driver got corrupted and couldn't recover???

Thanks for the suggestions.