Hi Folks,
Problem
I downladed the latest NVIDIA drivers for my 8800GT. Everything worked fine until I tried to start
Borderlands.
I was pretty busy lately - as always - and wanted to relax for an hour or so.
It hung at the splash screen. Damn. It really hung. CPU 0%, NO IO being done. Nothing.
Argh...
I attached my VS.NET 2010 debugger to that process and took a glimpse.
Hmm.. nothing interesting.
WaitForSingleObject means basically waiting for ownership of a Mutex or Win32 Kernel Event. A deadlock? Seems like some optimizations in the latest NVIDIA driver exposed a vulnerability of the game code towards deadlocks. It's probably not NVIDIAs fault ..
Anyway, the other threads didn't provide any useful info. Actually, I had no time. I just wanted to take one or two hours off and relax now.. So i decided to work-around it.
This is my quick hack
I decided to forcibly serialize / "single-thread" the execution..
I simply started Borderlands from Steam, as soon as the process started to appear in the process manager, I changed the affinity for that process to one physical CPU

This won't make the execution single-threaded, but would reduce the probability of the dead lock because there is no hardware parallelism anymore wrt CPU cores.
You have to be quick

If the splash screen appears, it's too late ... .
... Then the game started normally, it passed the splash screen ... I immediately activated all cores again.
If you have a SSD this may be difficult :-/ Anyway I could continue this way.
And off I went blasting off some psychos
REMEMBER: If it took more than one shot, you weren't using a Jakobs