Black or white blank screen when playing some games

I am experiencing a problem when playing certain games. When playing ZUMA, which is installed from a disk, not online, my display will suddenly turn white with what looks almost like circuit board designs running through it. The only recovery I can do at that point is to do a force reboot at which time windows loads normally and I can continue with normal functions. I have been in contact with the game manufacturer and frankly we are at the point of determining that it is not the game causing the problem. Recently I have experienced similar behavior when exiting a Reel Deal slot game, with the exception of the display going to blank black on which the cursor displays normally. Recovering from this also requires a force shutdown. I have windows 2000, Direct X 9c, a gig of Ram, and an Nvidia GeForce MX4000 video card. I have updated all drivers since this problem began. I checked the Windows event viewer and find that each time I experienced the display problem that an error was logged which was Event ID 10005 - Source - DCOM
MessageCOM got error "The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. " attempting to start the service WinMgmt with arguments " " in order to run the server:
{8BC3F05E-D86B-11D0-A075-00C04FB68820} So I went in to Services.msc and set both listings of WinMgmt to automatic. I have also noticed that my system is taking longer to shutdown, although no additional services are running.I did search previous forums and FAQ's and did not find any information regarding this particular issue. I found threads for the Event ID but with a different Source or different service listed in the message. Thank You for your time.

 

Hello Lv2bRomanced and welcome to the Board,

Have you tried running your system with less processes running to see if this behavior still occurs with less RAM/video card load?

Regards - Charles

 

Re: Response to Black or white blank screen

Thank you for your reply Charlesvar. I will check out your suggestion this evening and see how it goes. I will tell you that I try to keep processes to a minimum as a rule of thumb. I believe that I show 23 running at start up but will double check and see if I can reduce it further. I will let you know either way. After I posted I did go in and raise my virtual memory and much to my surprise I found that it was set for less than the minimum recommended. Thanks again and I will get back to you soon.

 

I apologize for the delay in getting back to this thread. As I mentioned in my last reply, I had discovered that my virtual memory setting was less than optimal and that I had increased it to the recommended minimum setting. First let me say that it was your suggestion that led me to think of checking that, as I never would have due to the fact that I knew I had already set my computer to be running minimal processes at boot up AND the fact that I have a gig of RAM. Low memory never crossed my mind until your reply. Anyway, since adjusting my virtual memory I have not encountered the blank screen problem. As of this writing I believe my problem is solved. I wanted to let you know what solution worked for this issue and also let others know that if they ever have cause to replace their video card that they should probably check their virtual memory setting to insure that it is set for optimal performance for their new video card. As I said, if not for your reply, that would have been the last thing I would have suspected given my computers hardware profile. Thank you very much for steering me in what turned out to be the right direction to resolve my issue.

Thanks Again,
Michelle

 

I wanted to get back with you and let you know that my previous post turned out to be incorrect and the change did NOT resolve my issue. What did resolve my problem, however, was to resolve the error that was popping up in the event log. I figured out that everytime I lost my game an error was being produced in the event log. Apparently the game was calling on a service that was disabled due to a problem with it not being able to start up correctly when called upon. This was what was causeing the disruption. Once I resolved that error I no longer had the issue with the game. Also the slowness in shutting down was resolved by setting a limit of 5 tries to update user profiles at shutdown. To correct the problem that I stated in my initial post with the WinMgmt service I found that the service was not able to start up at all. Once I switched it to automatic I started getting an error every few seconds stating that the service had been attempted to be started and that the system had tried x amount of times and that the service (WinMmgmt) could not be started. To resolve the issue I had to empty the repository folder which is located in C:WinNT/System32/Wbem/. Once that folder was emptied I was able to set the service to start manually and successfully started the service.