My friend has a problem which she is trying to describe to me via phone. Basically, the screen goes black and recovers to an 8 bit display setting 640 x 480. Then an error message appears: Microsoft detected and recovered from a device failure. Please save your work and reboot to restore to full functionality. It keeps happening upon restart. I've already told her to install the latest drivers to override the default XP ones, and this doesn't help. Also, virus scans have been done but I don't know whether she has the latest virus definitions.
Off the top of my head, it appears the video card (or chip) has gone bad. What does the h/w manager accessible via the control panel show? Any yellow exclamation marks next to a device?
No, that's the thing. Devices are all working properly. Installed NVIDIA GeForce MX drivers from the official site, overriding the Windows XP drivers which supposedly tend to give this particular cards these problems.
Is this a new video card? Has it ever worked properly? Did anything new get installed (sw or hw) prior to the error occurring?
As far as I know nothing was installed, in terms of hardware or software. I was thinking that perhaps it is a virus which does that. Keeps adjusting your display setting. Once it does it, I told her to try and manually change it back to 800 x 600 (or whatever) and it gives all the proper messages, flickers, and just stays as was.
How long has it been going on? Has she tried doing a "System Restore" to a point in time before this started happening. I know it doesn't always work, and may not since the problem might be the hardware itself. But it's easy enough to do (and undo) that it's at least worth a shot.
