Thread: come and get me

I'd come and get ya but I am at my grandmother's in Lafayette (just got her comp back up and running) and this thing is about as stable as Charles Manson.

Though I might be able to get some decent frame rates.........in Solitaire - come get some

I don't want to get you, cause then you'd get frustrated and probably cry.

Well, first things first, since Sunday I have not been able to run L4D or L4D2 and I'm not sure why. The games load up just fine to the menu screen but when I attempt to actually play the game (either single player or multiplayer) the game "crashes". Basically I get a screen of either pink fuzz or black and white specs and I have to reboot the PC (power off - on manually).

What I've tried so far:

*Cleaned a little dust out of the PC.
*Updated the video drivers.
*Made sure windows was updated.
*Ran a virus scan.
*Ran a Malwarebytes scan.
*Made sure McAfee and/or my router were not blocking Steam or L4D.
*Defragmented my hard drive and also ran check disk with the option to repair any errors.
*Verified my game cache and defragmented my game cache. More than once it has told me it has had to reaquire files but the game still crashes at the same point and in the same manner afterwards.
*Turned off my McAfee firewall completely for a short period of time (Windows firewall is already off) to test that to no avail.

Additional information: I have over 400 hours on L4D and almost 600 on L4D2, all on this PC and have not made any hardware changes since the game last functioned which was last Thursday - the last day I played (May 19). Just throwing that out there because this isn't an issue where I haven't ever played, just can't all of the sudden play now.

Games that are affected are L4D1 and 2 as well as Majesty 2. Majesty 2 has a similar issue in that the game will load but when I actually try to play a map it will load till the "Start" button is displayed and then crash with the pink fuzz all over the screen and also requires a hard reboot.

Other Steam games I own that work fine:
Supreme Commander 2
Rome: Total War Gold
Civilization IV
Team Fortress 2

Also, everything else on my PC works fine. Have no video problems outside of these three games. Have been able to watch video on the PC just fine, usually on Hulu but also on YouTube.

Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit
GeForce GTX 280
nForce 780i motherboard
8GB PC2 8500
Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz


I think that's all the information. Any ideas?

Have you tried re-installing the game?

Well, the more I messed around with things the worse it got. I reached the point where I could no longer load regular photos without the PC crashing. Yes I had tried to reinstall the game. I finally gave up and reformatted and am now reinstalling everything from the ground up.