nVidia control panel problems

[hellrazor]

Yesterday I noticed that the nVidia control panel crashes when I right-click on the taskbar icon. Today nVidia released an update (306.something) and instead I left-clicked on taskbar icon and went to help->update which promptly told me that the nVidia update service exited in an unusual way. So I decided to open up Services and scrolled down to the nVidia update service which hadn't started, so I told Windows to start, which told me that it couldn't start due to a login failure.

So does anybody know what's going on?

[erocker]

Failure with the installer possibly? Just uninstall your drivers via the Control Panel, download the latest drivers and install them.

[claylomax]

Originally Posted by erocker

Failure with the installer possibly? Just uninstall your drivers via the Control Panel, download the latest drivers and install them.

Use Driver Sweeper in Safe Mode after unistalling the drivers.

[MxPhenom 216]

Originally Posted by claylomax

Use Driver Sweeper in Safe Mode after unistalling the drivers.

No. Just check off the clean install option and it should be good to go.

[Frag Maniac]

Personally I never install Nvidia's update tool. It doesn't even seem to help keep you updated as it should anyway. Regardless, install latest driver via Custom>Perform clean install and any problems with it should be sorted out in the process.

I assume anyone having such problems though could be due to the firewall and/or AV tools they're running blocking the update tool or conflicting with it just enough in the background to keep it from fully functioning properly. It could just be a matter of setting up exclusions for them.

It's up to you whether to keep using the update utility, but it's not hard to stay in the loop as to when new drivers come out and if you ever forget what version you're on, the main page of the NCP says what version you're running.

[claylomax]

Originally Posted by MxPhenom 216

No. Just check off the clean install option and it should be good to go.

Actually "Clean Install" just reset whatever settings in the control panel to default but does not clear the remaining bits of the previous drivers.

[hellrazor]

Well I tried just using the clean install option (without uninstalling them) and everything seems to work now.

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by claylomax

Actually "Clean Install" just reset whatever settings in the control panel to default but does not clear the remaining bits of the previous drivers.

Exactly, but I've found that cleaning the drivers before re-install isn't really necessary anymore, they have gotten good enough that simply re-installing works most of the time.