Guild Wars 2

Sorry if this isnt very clear, I’m typing in a bit of a haze of frustration/anger (understatement). Tried rolling back drivers to what I had, it uninstalled in a messed up way that I was unable to reinstall ANY graphics drivers, had to do a system restore just to be able to (note, I know this is a bad idea), reinstalled, and now I have “bad driver” issues in GW2 (manifests itself in the same way as before) and other games — which if this was the issue in the first place was incredibly unclear going by GW2’s behavior alone. I may not be able to provide more info to help resolve this, if it is indeed related to other folks’ issues too, as I’m likely going to have to reinstall XP at this rate. Ugh.

EDIT: So the “bad driver” thing that was declared by another game (Minecraft, oddly) only seems to rear its head if I run GW2 first and do not reboot in between. Apparently the effects of its blackscreening mess up rendering until a reboot occurs. Also interestingly, I can’t tell Windows to reboot after having run GW2 and it does its messed-up thing. I have to do a hard reboot with the reset button on my computer case.

About every other time I run GW2 since I began playing again after about a one- or two-month hiatus, I get an unusual black screen upon logging in and the launcher gives way to the client. The screen is totally black save a flickering title bar. Keypress response is very laggy at this point, and if I’m able to alt-tab or bring up the task manager then the black GW2 window immediately shoves itself on top of them and prevents me from killing the process. If left long enough, GW2 will apparently make it to the character select screen as I can hear the title music — however, at this point my video adapter stops sending a signal, or perhaps stops rendering entirely. It’s hard to say, really.

I double-checked the nVidia Control Panel and all of Guild Wars 2’s graphics settings were already set to application controlled, where applicable — and I don’t recall ever altering them in the first place. I only ever tweak these sorts of settings on a per-application basis.

EDIT: Trying Windows key+L to try and get to the login screen during the title bar flickering phase yields an error message box that says “Failed to parse line 903” that recurs a few times after hitting its OK button before I’m thankfully led to the login screen. After that, I can sign in and the misbehaving client window actually allows me to ctrl-alt-del and kill GW2.exe. I also updated my graphics drivers (latest non-beta) in between the original incarnation of this post and this edit and the issue still occurs — actually 100% of the time now instead of approximately half the time. I do NOT overclock.

My system specs are as follows:
Windows XP Home
1.6GHz Intel Core2 Duo E6300 (I know this is below-minimum specs, but it runs fine, even back in beta when the client was far more CPU-heavy)
3GB RAM
Asus GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB

Enclosed is a dxdiag log.