LW96 and 64-bit Win7 System Lockup - HELP?

[rkpdesign]

New laptop with Win7-64bit about 9 days old.
Installed LW96 right off and had no problem rendering sample scenes from the 9.6 New Content folder.
Now after installing other apps, I tried rendering a scene last night and Layout 'locksup'/'freezes' after F9 (Render) or after Abort rendering. Doesn't happen until it renders, can see preview rendering and it finishes in the background but when Layout should say "Render Complete" and show the final image (as before), now it just hangs, no HDD activity and am forced to Hard Reset the machine (ouch!)
Tried reinstalling LW96, tried uninstalling/reinstalling Nvidia Drivers...

Any ideas? Or others had this happen to them? Thanks for anyone's help...

[ksp]

this sounds like a prob with the memory allocation.

have you tried rendering a really small scene?
have you setup windows page file?

(have a look at the memory segement allocation in LW aswell)

on my machine, if i render a scene that is too much too handle, it will generally crash if i cancel a render, or when i click ok. (this is when it tries to dump the render memory and clean up.)


(..it may not be this at all, as there are a thousand and one things that could also conflict.)

[rkpdesign]

@ksp: Tried adjusting the page file size to a fixed large size, but still the problem persists.

I did find if I boot to safe mode and run Layout, the problem disappears!
I have tried uninstalling Nvidia Graphics drivers and reinstalling them but have had no luck with that.
Running out of ideas and would appreciate any other suggestions!

[3dWannabe]

The very latest nVidia drivers are buggy. I had to revert back to 197.45 (which got a consensus as to most stable from my reading)

See if you can get some help here:

http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?f=9
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=306922
http://www.evga.com/forums/tt.aspx?forumid=6

[rkpdesign]

@3dwannabe...thanks for the suggestion! i did install the next-to-latest drivers after i read some info online.

FWIW, The new Asus laptop I bought automatically updated it's drivers and enabled audio 'enhancements'. This simple action causes Win7 to freeze apparently...the simple 'ping' on render-done or render-aborted was triggering this problem...EGAD! The problem was resolved by following the suggestions here:

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20100516044618656&board_id=3&model=G51Jx&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

Thanks for all who helped and offered suggestions!

[3dWannabe]

Ahhh - it's always something!

glad you got them working, but I did hear of report of crashes (I had my first BSOD), with drivers later than the one I mentioned, so be careful.