Ok, so this is an interesting problem.

At some random time today, I wasn't able to play any of my Source games. Kept giving me a "hl2.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close" error. I looked up some issues that might be causing this.

First, it may have been my anti-virus. It wasn't that. So the next thing I did was look up some new drivers for my 8800GTS. The newest drivers were released in November. I didn't remember downloading those, so I decided to go ahead and install them. If I did have it installed, a message would come up telling me that I already had it installed.

So, the installation is going, and up comes an error. Something about the Nvidia control panel not being able to install. This is where everything went wrong. The installation quit then asked me to restart my computer. I did.

Loading it back up, my resolution was at the lowest setting. It's like my video card wasn't even on the computer. It said "Found new hardware" which was my video card waiting to be installed. I installed it and restarted my computer. I was able to get to the Nvidia Control Panel now, seeing how I wasn't able to before (longer story from this, I just shortened it).

Now, after a couple of tries, I noticed that I don't even have any drivers installed. I can't install the newest drivers because it'll all just happen again. I've tried installing a later driver and it does the same thing.

I'm not sure what to do. Please please help.