It could happen to you!
The backstory is that my 3-year-old (which is about 923 in PC years) Radeon 9800 Pro quit on me a few weeks ago. Well, at least its cooling fan quit, leading to system lockups. I didn’t see an obvious way to replace the fan so I opted for replacing the card. PC is at least one generation behind in terms of graphics card interfaces, which limited my choices somewhat, but I settled rather quickly on the Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 in AGP flavor.
The card shipped with Catalyst 8.4 drivers, which are probably fine except for a known issue with Firefox displaying all default-styled hyperlinks as red. Sidebar: every time I think about how a video driver might have such a specific interaction with a single application, I get the cold sweats. Anyway, that sort of novelty doesn’t sit well with me. I like my hyperlinks blue and my gifs non-animated, please.
So, just update the drivers, right? Not so easy. The current version of Catalyst (8.11) failed to recognize my HD 3850 as compatible. A little bit of forums surfing turned up this thread on the Catalyst support forum, which provided some useful (if nearly incoherent) advice.
Translated a bit, here’s how to get Catalyst 8.11 to recognize your Sapphire HD 3850 AGP:
1. Download and unzip the Catalyst 8.11 package
2. Fire up regedt32 and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\PCI
3. Find the key that starts with VEN1002. Mine is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9596&SUBSYS_00281787&REV_00
4. Copy the key name to a text editor
5. In another text editor window, go to the directory where you unzipped the Catalyst package and open driver\install.ini. Search for 0x9505:0x25421002 and replace it with the numbers in the DEV and SUBSYS sections of the reg key. Following my example above, I use 0x9596:0x00281787
6. Open driver\CX_70266.ini and perform the same operation (find 0x9505:0x25421002 and replace it with 0x9596:0x00281787, or whatever values you found in your registry).
Save the config files and execute setup.exe. Now the driver install should recognize your card.
I suppose you can just download Catalyst 8.10 and the AGP Hotfix for that version. But clearly, that’s cheating, so it would make you a cheater. And you’re not a cheater, are ya?