Windows 7 and UTC: Caveat Emptor

IF you are running your BIOS Clock at UTC,
AND you are running Windows 7 in your local timezone
AND your local timezone is WEST of UTC,
AND ( Daylight Savings (Ends OR Finishes)
OR the year changes )
THEN your machine will lock up
AND will not boot
AND system restore will not work
AND recovery console will not work
UNTIL midnight UTC is reached (because internally some value goes negative (which is very largely positive for unsigned values)).

It locks so hard, even trying to boot to safe mode, that the caps lock light won't even come on.

If you can boot up in a timezone EAST of UTC it comes up OK.

Fallout 3 -- Crash Fixed

I've been swearing at Bethesda Softworks for some time since my Fallout 3 stopped working for no apparent reason, when I upgraded from Vista x64 to Windows 7 x64.

It failed once before and it turned out to be an nVidia video driver update, and a new update fixed it. However it's been over 6 months now and multiple nVidia updates have failed to fix it.

I spent some time this weekend debugging it, and discovered it's some kind of issue with Fallout 3 and DisplayLink drivers. I had tried unplugging my Mimo 7" USB auxillary monitor before, and Fallout 3 had still crashed. It turns out, that it was still crashing inside Fallout 3 when it returned from the DisplayLink drivers. I assume there's some monitor iteration or some other call going on, and it's not happy when something comes back with bounds smaller than the main screen.

Anyhow, if you have issues with Fallout 3 and you have "other" video/monitor drivers, try uninstalling them.