Atikmdag is part of the ATI graphics driver; Windows Vista got a function to detect lockups of graphics drivers and tries to re-initialize them, which results in a message like “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” – if you’re lucky, that’s it and everything works fine again, but if not, you get a bluescreen after the fifth attempt.

That’s just the problem my new main PC from early November had: after one to a few hours on the desktop with the nice glass and other window effects of Vista Aero enabled, the aforementioned message appeared, almost always with bluescreen. With the normal Basic theme there were never any problems (except that it’s not really pretty…).

As the internet tells, there are numerous other people with similar problems at various places as well as numerous possible causes and attempts to solve them – power supply, PCIe clock, memory, and and and. Didn’t apply to me or didn’t help.

That’s how i was with the Catalyst hotfix driver 8.10 – the first to support the brand-new Radeon HD4650 cards –, and due to negative reports from others I skipped 8.11 and 8.12. When Catalyst 9.1 was released at the end of January, I thought I’d give it another try and installed this driver together with the latest DirectX update (Nov.2008), and behold: The box runs stable with full Aero Glass effects for full 8 to 12 hour days without any crash since then.

Don’t know if this hint helps anyone else… Still, for the sake of completeness (and for anyone who’s curious), here are a few system specs:

Board:	MSI P35D3 Platinum
Chipset:	Intel P35 (oh, really?)
CPU:	Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.17GHz)
RAM:	4 GB (2x Crucial 2 GB DDR3-1066) upgraded to 8 GB (4x Crucial 2 GB DDR3-1066)
Graphics:	2x HIS HD4650 iSilence 4 (passive cooling)1
Power supply:	Enermax PRO82+ 525W
OS:	Windows Vista 64 Ultimate
Hard disks:	2x 640GB Samsung HD642JJ2
Case:	Antec P182
Noise:	very quiet

1. one card isn’t enough for 3 monitors… ↺
2. no RAID, just 2 disks ↺