Problem with DirectX and DXDIAG

Hi,

I've been having terrible problems trying to get my Asus V9520 Video Suite graphics card to capture video (it has the necessary hardware), including the BSOD every time I try to start capturing. The BSOD pinpoints NV4_mini.sys as the source of the problem. Having googled I find this is a fairly frequent occurrence, and a way suggested to help with diagnosing the cause is to use DXDIAG as a first step.

But Dxdiag.exe isn't installed anywhere on my computer. Since I already had DirectX 9 installed (and I'm running XP SP2), I can't understand how this can be the case - but it is! Nor have I been successful in trying to acquire Dxdiag.exe by installing a fresh download of DirectX over the top of the existing one. I just get a message telling me DirectX is already installed.

Leaving aside the mystery as to how it's possible to have DirectX installed without Dxdiag being included in it, can anyone suggest a way that I can correct this situation? Or am I going to have to do a fresh install of WinXP?

 

How are you trying to run dxdiag? Start>run>dxdiag should get you there. Have you searched your computer for dxdiag.exe? It should be located in your windows\system32 folder.

If you've already tried these things, sorry. Need to make sure.

If you don't have it, installing directx should install it. It's odd that it doesn't. You could try running the system file checker to get it back. Click start>run and type sfc /scannow. You may be prompted for your XP cd.

 

Hi Zander
Yup, I did both of these. Funny thing, though:- the reponse (negative, in both cases) is as near instantaneous as makes no difference.

Thanks for the suggestion - I didn't know about this tool. However, when I ran it it just checked that all protected Windows files were intact and in their original versions, and gave me no feedback. It didn't call for the XP CD.

I imagine that if I dared to explore the Registry I might find the answer, but that's a bit beyond my reach.

 

Hi PeteC

Thanks. I did this, and there are so many entries it would take me all day to count them - if I had the patience. They have various different IDs, and checking the Properties of one or two of these at random they seem to be of varying degrees of severity. Some are innocuous but others (eg ID 64004 "The protected system file c:\windows\system32\zipfldr.dll could not be restored to its original, valid version. The file version of the bad file is 6.0.2900.2180 The specific error code is 0x00000490 [Element not found.
] ") seem potentially worrying. Trouble is that there's no way to home in on any specific file, such as Dxdiag.exe, without viewing the properties of each and every event's ID in turn until one happens upon that particular one. Murphy's Law predicts that it will be the last one in the list! This would take me a month but long before then I'd have been carted off to the loony-bin (oops! not politically-correct).

Might I ask:- what conclusion do you draw from this? (I see that in your screenshot there were only two entries).