Last night one of the Windows (anniversary?) updates messed up the connection to my second monitor (which is a TV and only used to watch movies) and as a result whenever I switch to it or even duplicate my screen it keeps hanging in a continuous flashing loop, either instantaneously or after 2-3 minutes.
I already tried rolling back to 4 different versions of the NVidia driver (from NVidia, not MS) since I had this problem before some months ago when I updated the NVidia driver from 362.00. Rolling back to that one solved the problem and later on -when trying a newer driver resulting in the same problem- I rolled back again without problem so I figured 362.00 was the last that worked proper for me so far.
A few weeks ago another MS Update messed up my (only) account -in effect needing me to login with my password while I only knew my PIN- and after 10 consecutive days of troubleshooting using every known method to reset accounts through cmd/regedit/seth.file, Hiren and Linux distros I had to do a complete restore. While restoring and reinstalling drivers my NVidia driver was automatically updated to 368.69 and everything was fine regarding a newer GPU driver. So that was at least 1% of luck after 99% drama. Now again a MS update messed up something since it also updated my GPU to 368.81 (I didn't know you could turn of GPU driver updates in MS Auto-update till just now) and I am seriously pissed since again, every "normal" troubleshooting so far has been fruitless. From now on I will turn off auto-update as MS is seriously making a mess of things in my specific case twice in a row now and it's costing me way too much time to repair every time.
Today when MS rolled out some updates I found rolling back did not work. I tried manually uninstalling it in devicemanager and also with the help ofDD Uninstaller from Guruand in the end restored to 4 different dirvers and also tried a system restore prior to the MS Updates but both scenario's didn't work. Like with the "account" problem also today I have read some other threads about MS update messing up monitor settings but for most the common scenario's rolling back or a system restore seemed to work.
My setup is a NVidia GTX960 and I have my PC-monitor connected with a DVI-VGA cable and my TV is routed through a Home Cinema Receiver with HDMI. The TV is off most of the time and only when I want to watch a movie which is stored on my PC I use (Win key+P) to select the other monitor and switch. Prior to this I have to set my receiver to receive through a dedicated HDMI (PC) input. My TV btw. is always designated as my primairy screen, probably because it's HDMI but in practice this has never been a problem.
Furthermore I have a pretty high-end system with a Z-97Pro mobo/i4790K processor/16GB Ram so the problem is most certainly not with either my PC, TV or Home Cinema Set
So the problem varies a bit in manifestation, dependantely of randomness but also as for what method I choose to add the second screen (Win+P or Nvidia or configurationscreen). Most of the times as soon as I set my receiver to the PC "channel" the screen begins it's endless loop switching between the 2 monitors and this can only be stopped by setting the receiver to a different channel. Other times I can identify the TV manually but also then the screen switches, only in a slower interval (0,3, instead of 0,1 seconds) and once or twice I was able to set the proper channel on my receiver and the problems would not manifest until I actually switched the screen while in two instances the problem manifested after 2 or minutes (though this is not related to power or screensaver timers and one instance was when switching while the other was when duplicating. It's completely irradic but the common denomenator I think is, is Windows/NVidia recognizes my 2 screens as 1 (!). I say this because in NVidia properties I saw a "flashing" image of 2 monitors combined as 1 (as opposed to 2 individual screens) and the flickering and jumping from mouse indicates a resolution problem (my TV is 1920x1080 while my PC monitor is 1650x1080). My icons have always been scattered after using my TV but it is an annoyance I learned to live with since Win 7 as windows is notoriously known for having problems with 2 different resolutions.
Long post but I try to be conclusive. I'll continue looking for solutions myself but I can only try random things as de-installing/re-installing drivers and system restore aren't working for me so I have to reside to the proverbia "slap on the TV" scenario's and any suggestions would be greatly appeciated.
UPDATE: Solved by using DDU (Guru3D) in Safe Mode to uninstall several driver versions until I found my system stable with version 368.69.
