just downloaded and installed the newest driver (7.9) for my card listed and suddenly gamestudio is having mfc and memory problems, rolled my driver back to 7.8 and everything works,is this a problem with gamestudio or is my graphics card suddenly incompatible with gamestudio????!!!!

This is quite possible. It would not be the first time.

We don't have an ATI x1550 here at the moment, but I'll check if I can verify this driver bug. But usually when this happens, ATI or nVidia will fix this in the next driver version.

it seems from other posts i have seen that 7.9 actually diables direct3d. I am not 100% sure.

As a note
The error i got read something like this


The instruction at 0x73dd11c7 referenced memory at 0x00000004, the memory could not be "read"

Thats indeed a driver issue, I just produced this error
with a couple of machines here under various conditions.
But it might be also related to the .Net Framework.

no the net framework was not changed, just the driver, another person tested it on another ati card and when he had his falure he ran a dxdiag, which showed his direct x incapacited during the game run.