Radeon 9600 XT driver problems

[MrMan]

I have a Radeon 9600 XT (quite old i know) but have never been able to update the drivers. I download the latest Catalyst drivers and install them, but when i return to the desktop after rebooting the PC the refresh rate is really low (i.e. when i right click on the desktop the drop down menu appears very slowly...pages in IE take a while to refresh while scrolling down pages, things like that).

Obviously the first thing i thought was to up the refresh rate for the monitor, but i've tried all available ones and none make a difference. I always end up having to roll back the Catalyst drivers to the very early ones i have, which is now causing me problems with games such as CSS.

Does anyone know why i might be having this problem, or what i could do to fix it?

Thanks a lot for any help (as long as it's not "buy a new GFX card ")

 

[The Brick]

I remember experiencing that when I just installed the drivers. A second reboot got rid of the problem though. I also know that the Catalyst drivers need the windows .net framework 1.1 (the newest is 2, so get that). Otherwise you would get an error about CLI.EXE on startup (and the software wouldn't run).