are you able to monitor the mobo and processor temperature?
It may be that the graphic intensive operation is cooking your processor and it's shutting down.
If it is getting hot (anything over 80°C is a really BAD place to be - 65 ° to 70° seems about average) it is probably time to take off the covers and vacuum out the dust and fluff collected around the various fans and heatsinks, especially the CPU.
You might also be amazed at the amount of fluff and junk that collects between your floppy/CD/DVD drives if you slide them out a little bit. That's one of the ways that cool air is drawn into the PC case.
If you can also monitor the power supply voltages that might give a clue. You may either need to clean the fan area on the power supply or upgrade it to a higher wattage rating.
All stabs in the dark, but it looks very similar to problems I had a few months ago.
You mentioned that you were running the latest graphics driver. Is that one from the XP update site or is it the generic NVidia one for the chipset? I've found , so far, that the NVidia ones work best regardless of the graphic card manufacturer. You also get some "freebies" (usually) in the way of graphics tweaking tools bundled with the latest drivers from the chipset manufacturers.
Best of luck.
ST
Last edited by SoftTop; 6th January 2005 at 06:13.