My woes with games using a unified platform (GFWL, Steam) continue, though this time the problem lay not with Steam itself, but with any game using hl2.exe. I'm talking about Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half-Life 2 and Episodes. The games will run the title card featuring the black man with the spigot in the back of his skull, and then load the game's title card. After loading into the Main Menu, the music will play for two seconds, begin to skip badly, and then crash to WER saying "hl2.exe has stopped working".

All this comes after the update to ATi/AMD Catalyst 10.10 (isn't the number after "10.9" supposed to be "11.0"?)

Weird. Most people get the hl2.exe error AFTER they quit the game themselves, not before they play!

I know! But the only Source Engine game I got a WER message after I quit was Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

OFF TOPIC: I've been having trouble identifying your avatar. Is that an "A Bit of.." era Hugh Laurie? Or is that from Blackadder? As far as I know he only played one character in the series, and another in the made-for-TV movie "Back and Forth".

Blackadder. You win... half a candy bar.

More specifically, it's from episode 3 (Major Star) of Blackadder Goes Forth ;-)

You win... the other half of the candy bar (I'm tapped out).

Ok, I haven't noticed, probably because I've been playing older games recently, but all NEWER games, like Fallout: NV, Clive Barker's Jericho, and more are also crashing to WER after the introductory copyright and title cards.

Once again this comes right after installing ATi/AMD Catalyst 10.10. This is a really big problem, and a really big goof on AMD's part releasing a broken driver. OR, it could be the Steam Client did not install the damn thing properly. I'm going to download the Catalyst package, uninstall the current driver, run CCleaner and then reinstall the whole thing. I will update this when I'm done.

Your information is incorrect. He played the prince regent in Blackadder The Third, and Lieutenant The Honourable George Colthurst St. Barleigh in Blackadder Goes Forth, as well as various roles in Back And Forth.

Whatever, that's off-topic. The point is that it appears that ATi/AMD purposely sabotaged owners of cards that aren't HD 6XXX, because the only hotfix released for Catalyst 10.10 is advertised as being for owners of HD6870 and HD6850 cards, forcing owners of older cards to upgrade. I say "appears so" because I haven't any proof.

1. That's as may be, but it was you who started that off-topic discussion.

2. If your only comment is that it's off-topic, why did you bother quoting me in the first place?

No, because version numbers are sets of integers, usually separated by dots though I have seen them separated by commas on german websites, not decimal numbers.

10.36.753 is a completely valid version number, but not a valid decimal number (decimal numbers have at most a single decimal point). It's also not the same version as 10.3.67.53 or 10.36753, only the last is a valid decimal number (we Swedes use decimal commas instead, but whatever).

Actually "version" may be any string, though dot-separated integers seem to be the most common idea.

Stop hijacking. Yes, I started an off-topic discussion, but it was ended when my query was answered. The avatar is from Blackadder. The comment in parentheses was mentioned offhandedly and wasn't meant to garner a response.


I've installed hotfixes "a" and "c", and still many games aren't working. I'm going to uninstall 10.10 and reinstall 10.9 and update when I'm done.

No since the number after the point is a counterpart to the month when the driver is released.