Shaft,
It happened to me! My vid card messed up yesterday. I ran Si Sandra & it said the same things: no 3D hardware acceleration, etc.
I went to 'start' > 'run' & typed in dxdiag.exe. It ran Direct Draw but would NOT run DX! I went back into Si Sandra & opened up Direct X. It showed I had 3 monitors hooked up. 2 'default' monitors & the actual 1 monitor I have. Huh? It showed one 'default' monitor was controlled by my on-board video & one was controlled by the GF2 MX400, but w/o DX capabilities.
I right clicked on 'My Computer' > 'properties' > 'Device manager' > 'display adapters' & found my 'on-borad' chip was 'enabled'. I had disabled it in all hardware profiles & had to do it again. I then clicked on 'monitors' & found 3 there. 1 was disabled by disabling the 'on-board' chip, but I had a 'default' monitor' that shouldn't have been there. I removed it!
I rebooted the system & rechecked & the 'on-board' & the 'default' it controls were still disabled. The GF2 & the monitor I have were enabled. Good. I then ran dxdiag.exe again & couldn't run DX! Direct Draw worked fine tho'. Hmmm
I checked to make sure DX8.1 was installed (it was) & decided that maybe changing drivers might help. I had been running 29.20 but had a zip file of 28.32. It was late & I was tired so I installed 28.32 right over 29.20. No Det Destroyer, remove program or nothing. :knock:
It worked! Si Software shows 2 monitors, 'Device Manager' shows 1 disabled, dxdiag.exe runs Direct Draw & DX again!
I installed a 256 RAM chip 2 days ago & evidently it somehow (I'm thinking) caused Windows to detect another monitor & assigned the GF2 to it w/o the DX extensions. Maybe nwiz (the nView manager) got corrupted in the 29.20 driver too ??? & that is how I got all those monitors showing up. Running 'Fresh' only showed a slight 'drop' because it was running the correct card (GF2 w/DX) & monitor, but the game I tried (that is how I knew something was wrong) was on the bad 'default' monitor.
So, I'm running the 28.32 driver right now & it has allowed me to oc to 220 (29.20 'locked' @ 220) & 'Fresh' is even higher than before. I've shut down nView also since I only have 1 monitor hooked up. I ran 29.20 for 6-8weeks w/o any problems, but I'm staying w/28.32 for now.
HTH,