Just to update you on my troubles, I've tried uninstalling & deleting all my video card and monitor drivers and utilities and let Windows detect them again. No good, still says a device isn't functioning.

Earlier today my security software alerted me to a ati-something executable (located somewhere in the Windows directory) trying to create a new process out of the blue. Fearing malware I blocked it. When I rebooted my computer, my high-res wide screen monitor loaded with WinXP at only 800x600 resolution and I can't up it any higher (my LCD monitor is very picking about which resolutions it supports).

I've tried installing new drivers for my Radeon X300 graphics card, I've tried rolling back its drivers to earlier versions, I've tried uninstalling the drivers and installing the latest version from ATI/AMD's website, and I've tried installing the drivers that originally came with my computer from HP's website... nothing works, and I keep getting told that drivers can't install because of a hardware problem. Specifically:

"An error occurred during the installation of this device [i.e. my Radeon X300 graphics card]. A device attached to this system is not functioning."

Any recommendations on where I can go from here? Is this certainly a hardware problem?  Is my graphics card salvageable?

Since I didn't want to undo my changes and I knew no better fix I decided to just leave it  alone and hope it'd go away by itself.

The good news is, it did. ^_^ If only every fix was that simple.

A few days ago I changed the default drive letters of my drives to letters I'll actually be able to remember with Microsoft's Administrative Tools' Computer Management utility. This resulted in some problems when Windows registry entries pointed to locations that no longer exist, so I opened the registry and fixed the bulk of the entries... I also rand some Registry Cleaner type programs to catch anything I missed.

It mostly worked... but now when I open a My Computer window... and try to create a new folder- Oh no!

The new folder is created, but now explorer causes an error!

"explorer.exe has generated an error and needs to close"

...quickly followed by:

"drwtsn32.exe has generated errors and needs to be closed by Windows"

Most of the time I can "fix" things by closing down the explorer.exe and letting it start up again. It doesn't just happen when I try to create folders, sometimes it happens when I drag a file into a window, sometimes it just happens when I open a window, and sometimes I can create files and open windows and create folders just fine!

Any ideas what could be causing this... and more importantly... how to remedy it?

I've already considered rolling my system back to a previous state, but if I did that the drive letters would change, and if I fixed the drive letters I'd have to fix the registry and I'd have the same problem all over again.

A couple things that may or may not help w/ the diagnosis:

• Sometimes when I double click on a start menu folder to open the folder a "move items" dialog appears. If I ignore it, it disappears after a few seconds and the folder doesn't open. If I click cancel, it is followed by a "copy to a new location" dialog, which I then cancel... and the folder I want opens. This is annoying but it doesn't cause extensive problems, and I would guess is related to the "copy to folder...." and "move to folder..." additions I added to my context menu.
• After Explorer restarts, clicking programs on the taskbar doesn't minimize them.
• This only happens when I'm working with Explorer or My Computer... other file managers like FreeCommander don't crsh explorer