Dave-H

Ah thanks, scrap that theory then! That makes it even more strange if that is an official AMD driver, claiming to support the HD8180 under XP, which actually doesn't work! I'm now wondering if my hardware is different somehow to what the driver was designed for, which would explain everything.

I haven't checked MultiRes, but I'll certainly give it a try! When I boot into VGA mode using the F8 menu, I get an error on boot saying that Catalyst Control Center doesn't support the driver I'm using, and that happens if I try to run it after boot as well, saying it doesn't support the currently active GPU. Device Manager and Display Properties both say I'm using the Radeon HD 8180 driver. I'm wondering if this is actually a hacked Chinese driver, which still doesn't actually work on some hardware, including mine! Incidentally, the driver files are now version 6.14.10.7280, which I'm pretty certain is the same as the driver I was using before.

Oh dear, what a bummer! I was so hopeful that driver would work too, although I note that the Chinese download page does not mention the HD8180. I tried doing a complete clean again, and then another install, which again went perfectly until the reboot, at which the 0xEA BSOD came back again. Time to give up do we think? I guess there really is no XP compatible driver which will talk to my hardware without crashing. As AFAIK there is no hope whatsoever of getting a Vista or later driver working on XP, I guess that's game over.

No problem, just thought I should mention it in case it throws anyone else! Thanks again, Dave.

Well I tried the driver from the Chinese site, and everything looked very hopeful. For the first time, the Catalyst Install Manager offered me the graphics driver and the Catalyst Control Center. It appeared to install fine with no modifications to anything, no error messages. I was hoping for the best, but on reboot back came the BSOD! I'm wondering if there was something still left over from the previous installation, although i thought I'd cleaned everything with Driver Cleaner Pro. I will check and try again.

Thank you, it has! It's a uBlock filter BTW, not a rule, which confused me for a while. Cheers, Dave.

I just changed my YouTube user agent string on Firefox 52.9 ESR to - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome72.0.3626.121 Safari/537.36 The sidebar information has come back, but I'm now getting the "browser will soon be unsupported" nag at the top of the frame. Anyone got a good string that might get rid of the latter but keep the former?!

Wow, how do you find this stuff! Thanks a million guys. I will try that driver, as it does indeed seem to contain my hardware ID. I hope it hasn't been modded for that, it doesn't look as if it has been. @RainyShadow Yes, it will boot happily in VGA mode from the F8 menu and then works fine. However if I then try to raise the resolution level using the normal interface, it tries to refresh and then blue screens. I will certainly try Multires if the new driver that's been found by @win32 doesn't work any better than what I've already got. Cheers, and thanks all for sticking with this!

The PCI Bus Device ID is "ACPI\PNP0A08". I can't find any specifically ATI/AMD drivers for it. What driver file or files would you expect it to be using? At the moment it's just using the standard Microsoft version of "PCI.SYS". There is a "chipset.msi" file in the driver package I'm using, but it won't install, it just says "This installation package could not be opened. Contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows Installer package." After more experimenting, it seems that the driver is crashing when it's trying to apply settings to the driver, which is possibly why it works in VGA mode as that is the default mode so there is nothing to apply. That would seem to be why trying to change any settings when the driver is running also causes the crash.

@RainyShadow Yes, I guess the three monitors are the built-in display panel, the HDMI connection, and the external VGA connection. The latter two are not actually connected to anything of course. On Windows 8.1 the display driver is listed under "PCI Express Root Complex". Only one "Generic PnP Monitor" is listed as being connected to it.

I already removed all the duplicated devices in Safe Mode, and when I restarted again it put them back, exactly as they were before! I also had to reactivate Windows, as it thought the hardware had changed so much!

I think the duplication of the processor entries is because the two cores are recorded separately. In the previous netbook there were four entries! Not sure about the Motherboard Resources though....... The monitors were added automatically when the driver was installed, although there was only "Default Monitor" and "Plug and Play Monitor", I have no idea where the other "Default Monitor" has come from! Do you think I should delete everything in Safe Mode and let the Plug and Play system set everything up again? To belatedly answer @cdob, the previous netbook was also fairly recent so I'm sure wouldn't have been AGP based. It was another integrated CPU and graphics device, but an Intel Atom rather than AMD.

OK, booted into VGA mode, the graphics hardware doesn't seem to be connected to any interface in the PCI bus at all! It just appears as a separate entry in its own right. It says it's on "PCI bus 0, device 1, function 0".

Thanks guys! The machine will boot into VGA mode using the F8 menu. I've now found that trying to change the resolution settings will cause the BSOD even when Windows is running. Looking at the bootlog after a BSOD boot failure, it appears the the graphics driver ati2mtag.sys is loading OK, so it's something that's happening later that's causing the BSOD. The bootlog doesn't seem to give any clue as to what that is unfortunately. Thanks for that reference @RainyShadow, that's very interesting, although talking about a completely different type of system I suspect. Yesterday it did boot just once into the correct driver OK, but I now can't reproduce that! The screen came up asking what folder I wanted to boot from ("Windows XP on D:\" in this case) as if I'd used the F8 menu, although I didn't think that I had, and when I said OK it started up fine. The problem is I don't know why it was showing me that menu. I've tired other options from the F8 menu, but haven't been able to do it again.

OK, further thoughts! The file quoted on the BSOD is not the actual driver file, which is ati2mtag.sys, it's ati2dvag. Looking in the registry, that appears to be the name of the driver, and all the settings and configuration parameters are set under it. I'm now wondering if it's doing some operation on boot, which is looping and causing the crash, which it doesn't do when the driver is started from within Windows. I did think it a bit odd that even after installing the driver from scratch, it didn't insist on a reboot after the installation finished, in fact it just worked. Only on a subsequent boot does it fail, but I suspect that it's not the actual driver loading that's causing the problem. If it was it would crash when being enabled when Windows is running. Does that make any sense?

@dencorso Thanks Den, I restored the "Service Installation" section to the INF file, and it did then install, but couldn't start, the ubiquitous "code 10"! @RainyShadow Thanks, that was good thinking! I did the install again, everything was great, the display looked really good, and the refresh rate was fine. I then disabled in Autoruns everything related to the driver, when I rebooted as expected it reverted to the VGASAVE driver. I then enabled just the ATI driver (ati2mtag.sys), and nothing else, and it rebooted to the usual BSOD. I think we're running out of options here, unless anyone else has any suggestions. It looks as if the driver itself will not load on booting up, so unless I go through the rignarole of disabling the adapter before I shut down, and then re-enable it once the system has booted, which does work, I see no way around it. Such a shame, it seemed to be so close to working! BTW, I now have 1366x768 resolution with 32 bit colour in Safe Mode, which is something I never thought I would ever see, certainly not on XP!

Thanks @jaclaz, that has helped quite a bit! Now I don't know whether to just use this as it is, or still hold out to see if a better driver is possible. The fact that the ATI driver did work, although it wouldn't stay working over a reboot, leads me to think that it must be possible. I imagine it's just a matter as we said of pruning the INF file down to just install the driver and nothing else. If it won't work like that then it's probably time to give up! I did try removing all the "Service Installation" and "Software Installation" sections from the INF, but when I tried that it said it wasn't an XP compatible driver, so I must have removed something which has to be there!

OK, it seems it's now using a driver called "VGASAVE", which I'd not heard of before. Apparently it's the Windows driver it falls back to if there is no other graphics driver installed, or the system is in Safe Mode. I must say I had always assumed that the basic VGA driver was exactly that though, a VGA only driver, so I'm still surprised that it seems to be able produce higher resolutions than basic 640x480 with 8 bit colour.

OK, curiouser and curiouser! I had run Autoruns in the past on my main machine, but never on the netbook. When I ran it, it found quite a few orphaned registry entries, mainly where the files they referred to were no longer on the system. I cleaned it all up and everything was fine. I still had the extra tabs in the Display Properties advanced settings window though. I finally looked more closely at the error logs from when they crashed, and it turned out that the culprit was "emgdgui.dll", which of course turned out to be the Intel graphics user interface! Once that was gone and removed from the registry, the tabs were gone. So, I now had a machine clean of any graphics drivers. All the Intel and ATI/AMD files and registry entries had gone. Now here's the strange bit! On a whim I decided to try the resolution control on the Display Properties window, and to my amazement I found I could change it to a higher level (1366x768 with 32 bit colour) and it worked! The resolution changed, and it stuck. Even after a reboot, the resolution setting was still fine. The only thing I could find wrong was that the refresh rate seemed to be poor. So, how can that work when I have no graphics drivers loaded?! The Display Adapter still shows a yellow exclamation mark in Device Manager, and it says there are no driver files loaded and it's not using any resources. So, surely it should be stuck in VGA mode, as it was before? Any thoughts? I can probably use it like this, although the refresh rate is an issue when scrolling or moving things around on the screen, but AFAIK it shouldn't be working at all with no driver! Cheers, Dave.

What a great idea @jaclaz! Certainly worth a try if all else fails, but @RainyShadow has prompted me about something. I had already looked up EMGD and seen it was something to do with Intel, which I thought was strange as I thought I'd purged the system of all Intel-related files and registry entries, which were from when the system drive was in my old netbook, which was an Intel-based machine. Of course I've now realised that the crashing tabs on the Display Properties window are in fact the tabs from the old Intel graphics driver. Why they are still there I have no idea, but I certainly intend to find out! They may well be nothing to do with the AMD driver crashing, but it's one more thing to eliminate. I already have Autoruns, so I will deploy that and see what it shows. Cheers, Dave.

This is what I'm seeing, nothing in the sidebar except the block of links that are normally at the bottom of it.

I'm afraid I didn't have any luck at all with the Display Driver Uninstaller utility. As soon as I told it to uninstall the driver it immediately crashed every time, both in normal mode and Safe Mode ("....has run into a problem and needs to close") and apparently it was a "system exception". The Windows Application event log is full of .NET 4 exception errors. I guess I could try with an even earlier version. I then tried with Driver Cleaner Pro anyway, which I already had a copy of. That seemed to be more successful, but I manually removed any residual files and registry entries anyway. Unfortunately commenting out the HKLM lines in the INF file doesn't do the trick. The crashing tabs are still there on the Display properties, and the driver still crashes when the machine is rebooted. I'll have a look trough the INF file and see what else i think can be taken out, hopefully just leaving the basic driver install.

On Firefox 74 on Windows 10, I've noticed that collapsing the sidebar no longer removes it completely, it now collapses to a row of icons. I guess that's the code change which has stopped it appearing completely in Firefox 52 ESR.

I downloaded version 18.0.0.4 of the utility, which is the last that works on XP, 18.0.0.5 and later versions need .NET 4.5 apparently. I'll let you know how it goes! Thinking of you all in Italy. We've only been in full lockdown here in the UK for six days. I guess it will be weeks before we know if it's working or not.

My sidebar with the list of my subscriptions has disappeared again from YouTube on Firefox 52.9 ESR. It's just showing the information links that are normally at the bottom of it, but nothing else.