Vista - atikmdag has stopped responding.. (with a twist)

Hi,
I'm having the same problem as many others out there... When i play any game on my computer it freezes for a couple of seconds and then continues.. when i exit the game i get the message " atikmdag has stopped responding and successfully recovered" I have the Catalyst Install Manager on my computer but as far as I know I don't have the Control Panel.. Sometimes it freezes and I can continue playing the game but the game and the rest of my computer looses all color until I restart it. If I log off and log on to another file on my computer all colour returns but when I go back to my file there is still no colour. When it goes gray everything has weird patterns some vibrant and others not and all words become black squares..My computer crashed 2 months ago and i got it serviced. They said I had a defected mainboard? they replaced it but when I got my computer back I noticed they had also changed the graphics card without telling me? they changed it from a Nvidia 7 series ( I don't remember It very well) to a ATI Radeon HD 3400 series. 2 weeks after this problem started. At first I thought it was my drivers so I made sure all my drivers were up to date.. Now I'm don't know what it is because windows tells me its the driver even though the driver is already updated. Someone Please! help! It would be greatly appreciated.
Here are my computer specs
Windows Vista Home Premium 32Bit.
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @ 2.40GHz
3.00GB of RAM
ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series

Thanks again to all that help!
sincerely Airborn
And to add on- If I change my theme from windows vista to windows clasic while everything is gray there is colour again

Airborne

Here is a link to a page that describes the problem and suggests fixes. its here AMD Game Forums - ATIKMDAG.sys problems and TDR FAQ

Hope this helps and let us know if you need help

Ken

thanks! ill check it out and reply after ive found a fix

here are pictures of what it look like. One is in my game the other is my desktop. it just happened again

You know I looked at those for 5 minutes before I realized. Must be brain dead today. Anyway let us know if that link doesn't help


Ken

well it says " known vista issues that sometimes cause corrupt information to be sent to the video card from system memory(will be addressed completely in sp2)"

come to think of i t I had to do a system restore and it removed the sp2 which I had previously installed and i think that might be the cause well its worth a try so im installing sp2 now

uhh now i get another error while installing sp2 and there appears to be no fix

ok. so ive cleaned my registry uninstalled and reinstalled drivers twice tried turning of UAC nothing worked.. any other suggestions

Zigzag. I need more suggestions i tried uninstalling update KB958227 and it didnt work.. maybe its MY RAM? if it is what should I do? but people are also talking about clock speeds and fan % i have no idea how to do that...