Long story short and I'll try to make this as clear as I can: Last night I am playing Command & Conquer 3 that I have done so many times before. Suddenly my screen freezes in midgame (never happened before playing games or any other time ever) and the screen shows multiple artifacts. Temps were fine I might add.

Eventually I am able to move on but the screen resolution goes from 1920x1080 (which is the standard resolution for my new Samsung Monitor) to 800x600. it never Blue Screens but I did get the information on screen from Windows that the error code is 0xEA: THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER
A device driver problem has caused the system to pause indefinitely (hang). Typically, this is caused by a display driver waiting for the video hardware to enter an idle state. This might indicate a hardware problem with the video adapter, or a faulty video driver.

The driver specifically cited is nv4_disp.sys which is an Nvidia display driver.

The display driver isn't my main issue. I'll attempt to update the drivers later in hope that my video card isn't failing. My issue is with the folders in the Windows Folder in the C drive when I went to retrieve the minidump. There are folders there that I have never seen before. Except for two all are designated as $NtUninstall followed by a series of numbers and letters (and below them are the standard folders you would expect). Each of these new folders contains OS drivers.

What is really strange is that my Minidump folder contains no dump file. But if I do a search for minidump it finds it, there is a minidump file, but it is grayed out. And when I try to read it it says I have no administrative rights.

Right now the card seems to running fine but what to do with these folders? Sorry I could be more clear.

The folders are from MS updates, unless you plan on removing any of them then they can be deleted, i do it regularly to keep the C drive useage small.

not sure why you cant read the minidump though

Ididmyc600, thank you for your quick response. So if I understand you correctly the new folders I speak of are MS updates and it is okay to leave them as is, correct?

Also, do you have a clue as to why they would suddenly appear in the Windows folder after the crash?

By the way, I played 5 or 6 C&C 3 single player missions and all is well with the card so far.

Thanks again.

Hi Route44,

The folders you are speaking of are there so you can uninstall the updates, kind of like a 'backup' option. Generally they are removed when you run programs like CCleaner, as they can clog up a bit of space if there's much of them.

Did you recently install an update before the crashes started?

snowchick! How are you? Yes, I did a recent updates but that was about two to three days ago. I've never had this video card artifact or a Nvidia driver fail before. The fan is working fine.

What threw me off was this folders suddenly appearing in the Windows Folder when they weren't there before.

I have one more question if you don't mind. I have been having a steady of online freezing and the culprit is hungapp which I assume means an application was hung up and thus freezing. There are no infections. Is this an IE issue, an ISP issue, or a video card issue?

Thanks!

Hey Route

I'm good how about you? It's been a while.

I was just wondering whether there was a conflict between a new update and your driver, perhaps updating the graphics card driver will resolve this

Does it freeze at random? Or is it whenever you are opening, say 'tabs' for example. I've found a lot of issues with IE freezing while opening multiple tabs. To eliminate IE being the culprit, try installing firefox and see if you have the same issue. Then you can at least rule out IE if it still freezes and start looking at the other two.

I've had a lot of machines freeze on IE8, reverting back to IE7 usually solves this or just making the switch to firefox is a good one for some too.

Let me know how you get on