Okay, I have been using Blender for over a year, since 2.42a. I download every new version as soon as is is announced (or before ;)); this includes 2.45. So the below I do not think is related to graphics cards or incompatibility, It just appeared out of the blue.
Last night, I tried to open Blender via start menu and CPU just went up to 50%, and then windows just froze (this has never happened to me before, sure, windows crashes a lot, but I have never seen it freeze). I couldn’t do anything so I forced quit.
Upon restart, I tried opening the various other builds of blender (all graphicall) on my machine, all opened without a hitch. Then I tried to open the official release via command prompt… not to open it even, just to see if I could access the -h help text. Nothing appeared, no errors, no help text, just windows froze.
This morning I completely reinstalled Blender and what do you know, it works perfectly. So I go off to school, and I come back at around noon (we have short days this week), login, and then try to open blender. Windows freezes.
Now I cannot fix it :(. Even freshly unzipped downloaded Blender doesn’t work. I scanned and repaired the registry, reinstalled again, no cigars.
I’m stumped . If anyone has any ideas, I would greatly appreciate it if you helped me.
In the mean time, I can use some SVN builds instead.