System configuration:
* Toshiba Tecra 8200, 1 GHz Pentium III CPU, 512 MB RAM
* Windows 2000 Professional SP3, all critical updates installed
* DirectX 8.1 installed
* Running POV-Ray for Windows v3.5

Problem:
Yesterday my laptop started rebooting itself as soon as I open POV-Ray 3.5.
I'll get as far as the splash screen and then suddenly I see a black screen
as the laptop restarts itself.

The only thing that changed on my laptop yesterday was that I installed the
latest beta version of JASC Paint Shop Pro 8 (neat program btw... if it's
not the cause of my problem I'm gonna buy the release version). I have
already tried uninstalling POV-Ray 3.5 and PSP 8, followed by a
reapplication of  Win2K SP3, followed by a reinstallation of DirectX 8.1 and
a reinstall of POV-Ray 3.5 (w/o PSP 8). And it STILL causes my laptop to
reboot itself. What's really strange is that I haven't been able to
replicate the problem with other graphically-intensive programs (e.g.,
ThumbsPlus, PSP, etc.)... only POV-Ray.

The problem seems to be display-related, because if I run the VGA driver in
Safe Mode, POV-Ray starts up just fine. It will also (but not always) start
up if I run my laptop at a really low resolution and color depth (i.e.,
800x600 16 color).

Here's my question: I'm sure it's not a bug in POV-Ray but a hardware
problem on my machine, but it would be helpful if someone on the programming
team could tell me if POV-Ray tries to do anything with the display
subsystem during startup that could cause a flaky video card to freak out
(e.g., does POV-Ray call any DirectX functions that momentarily exercise the
video card?). Any help greatly appreciated... thanks.

Scott Gammans
http://www.scottgammans.com

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