So my LFS hangs up after about 1 lap of driving (any track/car combo). Both just me driving or a grid (any number) of AI drivers.

Sounds keeps looping the last 2 seconds and screen has gray-ish vertical stripes. Computer does not respond to anything until I manually reboot it through the on/off switch.

Specs: Asus M3A mobo, AMD Phenom 9500 quadcore, 2GB RAM, ATI HD 5750 graphics card with latest drivers, 500W PSU, 120GB HDD yadayada. Computer running Vista ultimate is completely up-to-date driver/update wise.

All temperatures seem perfectly fine to me. They'd better be with a large CPU cooler and 2 casefans in push/pull configuration.

The problem also occurred on my 'old' config with an ATI HD 3570 and windows XP. The rest hasn't changed.

What gives? Any suggestions before I enable free fall hardware acceleration and commit my life to Forza?

That seems to me as though your graphics card 3D engine is about to have a heart attack. A similar thing happened to me with my old AGP NV5500 card a couple of years ago.
To check, try any other 3D intensive application you may have, if the same or similar happens, it may be time to invest in another graphics card.
It may also be that the fan on your graphics card is dieing and the chip is overheating, in that case, a new fan would save the day at a lot cheaper cost to you.
Hope this helps

I've never had any problems in rendering fairly big drawings in SolidWorks or playing any other games. Not that there were much. It's also strange that the same thing happens on 2 different graphic cards. LFS has run fine before on the old card before it showed this weird behavior.

Temperatures are still well within normal limits, both reported by the computer as measured by myself.

Did you tried a fesh LFS install?

(just to discard the easy solution hehe)

Multiple times. Fresh LFS, fresh drivers, fresh OS, fresh whatever else you can think of. It's kind of annoying, this PC only gets used for some solidworks drawing, watching tv shows and LFS. No particular order.

Tried changing your wallpaper?

SolidWorks doesn't utilize GPU much, does it? Maybe you can download 3DMark and run a couple of GPU stress tests, monitor temperatures and wait for the crash to occur (if it does occur that it).
Another thing I can think of is the motherboard, is there any dust buildup on it? You can try giving it a good clean, make sure the video card is properly installed and check if there is a BIOS update available.

Quote from E.Reiljans :

Tried changing your wallpaper?

Is this some sort of joke I didn't get?

BIOS is latest version, everything inside the case is close to dust free and properly installed. I'm going to run 3d mark in a few moments. I don't know how much the GPU is taxed when using solidworks for instance, but it's been pretty smooth actually. The only problem was (and still is) running LFS. I'll wait and see what the 3d test brings up. Thanks for the suggestions

Quote from MadCatX :

Is this some sort of joke I didn't get?

Just as relevant as "fresh LFS install".

Thank you for your considerate additions E.Reiljans.

I changed power settings from balanced to performance and now have 5 AI finishing a 5-lap race. This hasn't happened in a long while. Could it be this simple (stupid) or should I expect shenanigans again as soon as I actually try to race myself?