Gaming bugs and glitches with Intel HD graphics anyone?

I was hoping the latest firmware and driver updates would have solved this but I have the following problems:

Oblivion - locks up (whole computer)

Guild Wars - locks up (whole computer)

Conan - locks up (whole computer)

Sometimes it will work for hours, even days, then it will lock up repeatedly within minutes of starting the game.  Temperatures are not a problem.

I have had no problems in 2D world, only with games.  When it was new, I would get the message that the graphics crashed and it recovered.  sometimes I could recover from the crash by pulling up the task manager and cancelling it, but not anymore.  Now it just locks up, often with a nasty noise in the speaker.

Asrock Z68 Pro3, Windows 7 Professional 64bit, 8 gig ram, two monitors

I'm using the asrock provided driver VGA driver ver:15.22.2.2372

I have serious issues with the intel IGPU drivers as well. The current games I'm trying to play (and failing miserably because of the poor drivers) are;

Tropico: When enabling hardware acceleration in-game the display is completely garbled, I also can't change resolution from 1024*768 to my native resolution of 1366*768.

Tropic 2: I can't change resolution from 1024*768 to my native 1366*768.

Tropico 3: The game just runs like crap even with all in-game settings set to low / off.. I know the integrated 4500M IGPU isn't exactly powerful but it should surely be powerful enough with 10 unified pipelines to run Tropico 3 in my native resolution with medium settings and get around 20FPS. Hell, I can even run Mass Effect 2 at good settings with the aid of a modded driver and thats far more demanding than Tropico 3! Come on intel, sort yourselves out..

My laptop specs:

T7700 (dual core 2.4GHz, 4MB cache)

2x2GB PC6400 5-5-5-15

Intel 4500M (10 unified pipelines @ 400MHz) w\ 2413 driver

Latest DirectX & Audio drivers

I'll be keeping a close eye on this thread in hopes of a remedy at least to the poor Tropico 3 performance.

Any further news on these issues yet?

Yups wrote:

 

When I change a graphics setting in Quake 3 or Soldier of fortune II the gamma looks for a second normal bright and then it switched back to the darkness.

I noticed that too, but only with ioquake: when the game starts the brightness is normal for a couple of seconds while the "id software" animation is displayed. Later, if a "vid_restart"  is done, again the bightness returns to normal for a couple of seconds.

There's another small annoyance I didn't mention before: if I start quake 3 while the Firefox window is minimized, then the game plays with a solid grey screen (the sound plays normally, indicating that the game is not crashed). This issue doesn't happen with ioquke, only with id software quake 3 builds.

Yups wrote:

 

Obviously there is a big gamma bug in Intels driver. Very annoying. What IGP do you have?

I have a HD 3000 (remember, it's me who reported the quake 3 issue in the first place ).