Trouble with my PC

[Rbloom]

Okay, I've got a few various issues I'm trying to hammer out. I'm not the most tech-inclined person out there, and a friend recommended I seek out you lot for help. I know at least part of some of these issues has been posted about before, but since the remedies I read did not work, and there are various other issues I'm having I figured it'd warrant a new thread.

Ok, here's the situation. I just recently bought a new Asus 6850 graphics card to replace my old card. It worked wonderfully. I had virtually no issues at all with it out of the box. Installation was probably the easiest of any hardware I've ever done, and it ran FFXIV flawlessly with a 50-60 framerate on the highest settings, save for ambient occlusion and all that nonsense.

I ended up buying Saints Row The Third from Steam when it was on sale during the holidays. I am well aware there is a huge issue with that game's compatibility with AMD cards, but I was able to run it with direct x 9 mode (instead of the 10/11 mode) on high'ish settings with about a 40 FPS rate. Though over the past 5 days or so it has been running at a staggering 2-10 FPS with the same settings. Even if i crank it down to low on direct x 9 mode its still the same horrendous frame rate, rendering it unplayable. I've checked for patches, updates, and drivers but im up to date on all of them. Not sure why it dropped so much.

I mentioned the above thing because it may help diagnose the problem I'm having with FFXIV. Around the same time frame (new years'ish), I began to suffer from terrible load times of character models in and outside of town. It's much much worse in ul'dah than it is anywhere else, taking anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes of standing still before npc's or players will load (i've actually timed it with a stop watch, and it fluctuates between that time frame). I have a green connection indicator, and my ping is rarely above 50. I run nothing else in the background when i play, and i play it in fullscreen mode. I don't THINK it's the new card causing this havoc because i've had it for about 2 weeks, and the problems are no more than a week old, but i don't know that much about these things. My framerates in FF14 are still pretty steady at about 45~55 FPS, also, i should add.

Then, the third issue is with CCC. I cannot get Catalyst Control Center to open for the life of me. I've read some fixes for this issue but they involve massive uninstalls and reinstalls of pretty much everything that relates to or even uses catalyst... If there's any solution to this problem that doesnt involve a damn near reformat level wipe of my pc, i'd like to try that first.

Oh, while I'm here... I also have had occasional (usually pretty rare) crashes for the year or so i've owned this PC. Right before it crashes, the image will freeze, and whatever sound was playing will be repeated really fast and produce a god awful squeal. This most often happens when I'm watching netflix or listening to music on pandora. I've tried reinstalling silverlight but that didnt help at all.

Ummm... this is what i know off the top of my head about my pc:

Asus 6850 video card
i5 processor
6 gb ddr3 ram
Liquid cooling with some pretty ample fan cooling (my temps never get anywhere near as high as what my gamer friends' do... So i doubt heat is the issue.)

Think that pretty well sums it up... But i should also note i've ran virus scans galore, just to eliminate that.

[Kiehl]

Sounds a lot like what happened to me. CCC bugged out on an update. It would not open no matter what I tried. Only "fix" that worked for me was a reformat. Good luck.

[Minions]

For CCC, you can use a driver sweeper to clean out all of your ATI/Catalyst drivers and start fresh.

http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

Be Forewarned, removing some drivers will mess your pc hard (see removing evga drivers for video card, and having a evga motherboard... just make sure you know what you are removing)

[Rbloom]

I've already tried to remove the drivers and do a fresh reinstall. It didn't work. CCC still wouldn't open.

Does anyone know if ASUS SmartDoctor / ASUS splendid could interfere with CCC?