Windows 7 issues - taskhost.exe freezing....

If you right clicked desktop and chose refesh does that do anything to remove the imprint

Nope, doesn't change it.

I haven't tried any other games tonight -- been dicking around with some CSS mods, but I know it didn't do it with L4D, TF2 and whatever others I've played....

It might be an issue specific to Catalyst 9.5 as well... in a bit I'll revert back to 9.4 and see if that happens. Could be driver-related, but I'm guessing it's CSS & OS related.

I'm about ready to give up on Windows 7 now.... I was playing CSS trying to follow sounds and well... they got left and right ****ed up in the Asus Xonar Vista sound driver in CSS... definitely a driver issue, but it's not very useful for me :|

That would be annoying looking right when the sound should have been on the left

I'd kind of like to continue checking it out, but at this point I think I've ran enough to see there's some problems that ruin it for me, both with the OS and drivers.

But I am able to take away that game performance is overall very good, and while stability and memory management still need some work, it's so much better than Vista in terms of speed and stability that the English language lacks words large enough to describe the difference.

By the time a DX11 only game hits the shelves, which would be my incentive to upgrade at this point, these issues should all be fixed. I'd actually consider running this for more than a few days as long as they fix these problems with it, which is better than my expectations based on how bad Microsoft's been lately. By release time, I should be able to get some third-party software to bring me a more usable start menu - either the classic start menu, or something that they at the very least put some thought into.

There are several ways to dual boot some use Microsofts way and install Windows 7 after Windows XP so that Windows 7 can setup the necessary boot files

I myself - I am using a thrid party software that manages the Master Boot Record
If you would like to know more about multi booting I would be glad to help out with questions

I know how to do it -- I'm just not sure it's worth the time. The Windows boot loader can actually do it just fine, and I know how to modify the boot.ini file as needed. Thanks for offering though, that's kind of you

I do have my own storage drive so formatting is not too bad... if they run RC2 I could always check that out -- but I pretty much saw what I was looking for with Windows 7. I really wanted to check it out and see if there's any hope for the future of Windows more than anything. If Steam wouldn't freeze, I'd keep running it now.

My sounds seem to be okay. I think I may have experienced a bug in CSS because I reloaded the map and they worked correctly, but before that, I was on a breakfloor-map server with 4 people including myself. The three others were to my left, a little ways out and I heard the gunshots coming from the right and all that was there was a wall :|

I did figure out the transparent CSS-issue. It does also affect TF2, and I'm sure any other source-game. I had turned on 32xAA via CCC, using a base of 16xMSAA which uses Crossfire AA. When I use 16x as a base, it uses Crossfire and a bug with the source engine/CCC/Windows 7 causes it to display the transparency issue. I switched it to application controlled, and then 24xAA (with 8x as a base) and It was fine in other games...