Sound/video codecs causing a crash?

Factual Questions
1

I continue to encounter the blue screen of death in WinXP when running graphics-intensive operations. I think I may have isolated a possible cause (finally) today, but I’d like a second opinion, and some hints for where to go next.

I have a Shuttle AK35GTR motherboard with CMedia on-board audio, 1024MB of RAM, an nVidia Ti4200 64MB video card manufactured by Chaintech (using an older, more stable set of drivers for now), and otherwise pretty generic hardware. I’m running WinXP Home, Service Pack 2, with the latest DirectX runtime. All of my hardware (incl. BIOS) is patched and running the latest drivers except for my video card which runs a slightly dated driver for stability’s sake.

When I play media-intensive games like SimCity 4, Halo, or Counter-Strike:Source, I am guaranteed a hard crash within a half hour. SC4 will occasionally just crash to desktop, but more often than not it’s a stutter-crash, where the screen freezes and the sound locks up in a long, irritating stutter. This bug also makes itself known when playing QuickTime movies in my browser, and when playing AVI, MPG, or WMV movies in Windows Media Player – but not when using Nero Showtime or WinAmp.

So, my questions are:

  1. What graphics or sound codecs/libraries/etc. do the crashy programs use that the non-crashy ones don’t use?

  2. How can I remove those from my system and still enjoy the games that I love?

  3. How can I tell WinXP to never ever ever install them again?

2

Addendum: I managed to duplicate the problem under WinAmp, and now I’ve managed to get the problem to occur on WinXP startup. The Windows sound (“BING ba-ding ding ding DING ahhhhhhhh”) just plays the first three notes and then stutter-crashes. I can almost certainly get around this by going to safe mode, but it’s plain to me that the problem is caused by my sound card and not by video.