FFXI and ATI causes lockupsFollow

My previous card, a visiontek geforce 3 ti500, recently died on me. I went out and bought a new radeon 9600 SE. I downloaded the latest drivers off ati's site because in my mind, I knew that the ones on the cd were out of date.

So I logged in, started walking around (in Rabao) and as soon as I went near the water LOCK. Forced to reboot. I get back into windows, log into ffxi, got a teleport-mea, about a minute after getting off the telepoint LOCK. Forced to reboot. I'm somehow unable to play FFXI without it leading to me rebooting my computer.

Now earlier I said I chose not to install the CD drivers that came with the card. However, after browsing some threads in regards to ATI drivers (notably cat 4.5s) and FFXI, I went on a whim and downloaded cat 4.2s. Logged back into XI and so far it had seemed the problem went away. Then out of nowhere LOCK again. The lockups have now become a random occurence. I don't know when it'll happen only that it HAS happened everytime I've tried to play. So I ask anyone here if they perhaps had run into this problem and if they were able to solve it, to please post as I'm now just fed up with XI sooo much, I'm thinking of just burning the damn game in a fire barrel outside my apt complex.

My comp specs:
Win2k SP4
Soyo kt333 dragon lite
amd athlon xp 1.8ghz thoroughbred
768MB ddr pc2700
80gb/80gb maxtors
ati radeon 9600SE 128MB (currently on cat 4.2)
Creative Live! Value soundcard
6 case fans

that power thing is interesting and i'll give it a try... but here's what's strange: I can play call of duty, theif 3, almost any other game i've tried so far does not cause me to lock up.

It's odd that it's only FFXI and that it only started when you got the new card.

Another 2 suggestions:
1) Bump all the graphics settings to the lowest level and play for 15 minutes. If you don't get a crash, raise the levels up slightly and try again. Keep doing this until you get a crash. It may lead to some more information about how to solve this problem.

2) Run the POL file checker on FFXI so it checks all your files and makes sure they're the correct version. It's possible that a few files are out of whack and that's what's causing the problem.

I'm doing the same...but just because I'm tired of it.
Don't give up yet. Maybe someone who knows the right answer will come along. Sorry I was not able to help.

Yeah, sometimes my computer is experince utter lockups and black screen of death. I mainly blame on the temperature inside my room because it's so hot, so.. I don't know. Humid makes it worst tho, but don't give up!

Yes, disable the VPU recover, this could very likeley fix your problem, for some strange reason VPU recover can cause games to crash like that.