Serious video card problems

[notsoscary]

Okay, this is gonna be a very long post, so bare with me.... I have a hp Pavillion 424.uk, a fairly standard p.c when i bought it, but being an avid gamer i soon realised i needed to upgrade, since then i bought new memory and a new graphics card (Crucial RADEON x700 agp), everything worked great for months, with only a few problems with some games, but they were bugs with the game and not my p.c, i couldn't of been happier, but then my main harddrive started to go wrong, started making clicking sounds and soon enough my computer wouldn't start, i tried to get a professional to fix it, but they said it was unrepairable, so i ended up having to buy a new harddrive and a copy of Windows XP home edition. After re-installing all my drivers and software i thought everything would be back to normal, but no, my computer is having some really strange issues with my graphics card, for some reason it detects 8 "video controllers (vga comptable)", although i can install these controllers it also installs a new monitor for each (even though there is only one monitor connected) and by the 8th one the monitor goes back and makes the same clicky sound like when you try to change resolution. This forces me to reboot and instead of the standard windows xp welcome screen i get a blue screen saying windows has been shut down to prevent damage to the computer, with possibly the only relevant information on the screen being this "STOP 0x0000007F (0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x0000000)" i think i may have got the number of zeros wrong on that, but anyway, i have to reboot and use "last know good settings" or safe mode, uninstalling the drivers is the only way i can get back into windows, although sometimes it displays all 8 video controlers as installed saying i have 8 radeon x700's but the computer is still running on onboard video. I know for a fact that there should on be two video controllers, a RADEON x700 and the RADEON x700 (secondary). On three seemingly random occaisions the computer actually gets it right and the video card works although rebooting or turning off the computer just means it'll go back to the original problem. I've tried replicating the conditions of the three times it worked, but each time the settings were different and replicating them has no effect. This problem is driving me insane, i've submitted this problem to ati and hp but they haven't got back to me at all (its been a month now). From what i can gather, there isn't a problem with my computer itself, as everything worked fine under the original windows install that came with it when i bought the computer, rather the problem lies with the new xp install, there must be some driver or some piece of software missing from the new install that hp had put on my p.c to begin with, which is now totally inaccessable due to the harddrive its on being completely useless (except as a paperweight). Anything anyone can suggest to help me with this would be greatly appreciated!

 

Bob.

 

Heres my current computer specs:

Hp Pavillion 424.uk

Windows XP SP2

768mb DDR SDRAM (1x 256mb, 1x512mb)

2.4ghz Intel Pentium 4

MS-6577 v2.x (Xenon 3) Motherboard

Intel 845G-B Chipset

AGP 4x Graphics connector

Crucial Radeon x700 - 256MB DDR SDRAM

1x 120gig Harddrive

1x 80gig Harddrive

Any further computer information available on request.

[Maven]

I have a similiar problem. I got this card from a friend, because my girlfriends last card was having artifact problems. This card shows up as 8 different devices and then complains that it doesn't have any resources to use it. It displays in 4 bit color.

 

Occasionally the card works fine and then it works like a dream, the rest of the time it's a nightmare. HELP my girlfriend is taking over my computer!

 

I'll try and give the specs later, I believe it's fairly similiar to the system above on speed. It's a Gateway though, and has 1 GB of RAM.