chop/stutter & graphics nightmare - formerly smooth play is suddenly unplayable

[civincable]

After having played one game all the way through on warlord and another nearly all the way through on noble with little to no trouble I have suddenly encountered atrocious game performance. At this point I can't even use one of the games I saved halfway through an old campaign even though it previously played beautifully. Even starting over now, with a brand new scenario, the game now has these glitches:
The entire game freezes for several seconds - all graphics freeze; the sound gets hung up and sounds like a rapid-fire broken record techno song; anything I may have clicked on (which isn't always the case, sometimes it seems like edge-scrolling can cause the hang or even nothing at all) won't appear until the hang stops. I only get an average of something like 5-10 seconds between hangs and the hangs last anywhere between 2-15 seconds. Basically the game is unplayable at this point.
I've spent the whole day trying the following remedies (to no avail):
-I installed the latest patch 6 weeks before all this happened and it caused no problems
-updated any and all drivers I could think of (video card, sound card, hard drive, monitor)
-updated windows XP with anything and everything I was lacking (not too much)
-read through the tech forums here for an hour or two and decided to try changing some quantities in the ini. file - "memsaver" now = 1 and "allow screenshots" now = 0 (just random quasi-educated guesses on my part)
-changed the page file to get the most allowable, now set at 4096mb (too much?)

I exceed all of the minimum reqs and nearly all of the recommended specs but I'm still having massive gameplay meltdown. I dearly hope there is some help for me cuz I was nearly to the year 2000 with a very successful campaign before the game went nuts on me.

 

[Zanmato]

I would reduce the pagefile, perhaps down to 1-1.5Gb. A 4Gb pagefile could well be heavily fragmented across the HD, possibly slowing it down. So firstly, set the pagefile to 0, restart, defrag the HD then reset it to 1Gb and restart.

Have MemSaver off and Screenshots on.
Try RivaTuner and force the shaders to 1.1.

Seems strange has to why it suddenly started messing up so maybe the Fx5200 is giving in.
I had such a card and was having the same problems as you described but in the end I just upgraded and the problems went away.
However, try popping in another 512mb of RAM if you can and it might help smooth out some of the play.

 

[civincable]

Thanks for the tips. I've tried everything you suggested with the exception of Rivatuner. Wouldn't it be odd that I would need to tune my vid card when it was working like a champ 2 weeks ago? By the way, I neglected to mention that the video is scrambled at this point as well. Huge color blocks, colors where they don't belong, mountains superimposed on coastlines - all kinds of wacky stuff. Additionally, a lot of games I try to play in flash (on the web) momentarily sieze up as well now. I'm sure it's related. Would this suggest a flash problem? Does CIV even use flash? Maybe a Windows problem? Can a video card just plain go bad?

 

[Zanmato]

If you're having problems outside the game then it's a problem with the system or hardware. From what you describe it sounds like the power supply or video card is dying, yes it can happen. Intensive games like Civ have been known to blow video cards up or overheat them causing hardware damage.

That is however your worst case scenerio. I would first check for any viruses, spyware, etc. Run CHKDSK. Clear out your temp folder, run '%temp%' and delete everything you can there. Apply any Window updates you may have missed. Do all this just so you can rule out a problem with the software then you can look towards the hardware.

Poor powers supplies can cause video cards to display stuff incorrectly or not at all. If you can get hold of another PSU or video card just to test with then give that a go and see what happens.