Gears of War hangs

[Adabiviak]

I'm trying to run Gears of War and it fully locks up Windows when you go to load a campaign (the little "loading" gear turns a few degrees, then everything freezes... mouse, keyboard, etc.) I ran it in windowed mode to see if it was just the program that was stuck, but it freezes Windows entirely. It ran fine before, and don't know of any recently installed software that would bork it. The drivers, for example, are the same ones that I've had for months, and were used when I played it before. I'm going through the troubleshooting process, and am looking for further suggestions about the next best direction. Here's what I've tried so far:

• Uninstalled and resinstalled. Twice. Then a third time to a different hard drive.
• Changed the settings to default (no DX10, medium settings, etc.)
• Cleared GFWL options, and then pointed them at the install directory.
• edit - logging into GFWL with a local account loads the game fine, so it appears to be a GFWL issue. The only reason I got an actual GFWL account was because Bioshock 2 required it. :hmph: What might it be about my GFWL account that would cause GOW to hang?

Now I'll be trying things that don't seem to make sense, so I'm up for suggestions. I don't suppose anyone has seen this before? What's one of the first things Gears of War tries to load when you go to actually start a campaign? This appears to be the deal breaker, but I don't know what it is. I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, with an nVidia 280GTX on 196.21 drivers.

Thanks in advance.