Major Problem with Vista and Thinkpad Dock II

[noetus]

In an earlier post I reported a problem with Vista RC2 running with two video cards, the onboard chip and an external card in the Dock II. I am unhappy to report that this has NOT been fixed in the RTM release of Vista.

What exactly is the problem? Well, upon installing Vista the video drivers won't start, leaving the display with basic VGA, low refresh rate on the CRT, no dual-monitor support etc (and no Aero, of course - the basic VGA pulls the "Windows Experience Index" down to 1.0). Checking the driver properties reveals the following error:

"This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)

If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system."

The Texas PCI-1420 Cardbus Controller drivers also won't start, with a similar error. Disabling the PCI-1420 drivers, and the onboard ATI video driver and rebooting does NOT help. The only solution is to UNDOCK and run exclusively on the laptop LCD with no external card attached. Bummer!

(In order to prevent the obvious: no, the problem is not with the video card. I have tried 5 different PCI video cards of various models. No, the problem is not with the video driver. I have tried both the drivers included with Vista and the Nvidia/ATI Vista drivers. This is a documented issue with Vista.)

Another solution would be to remove the internal graphics card/chip, which would resolve the conflict (maybe), but of course on a laptop this is not possible.

This appears to be a common problem, and on desktop systems with two video cards it has been fixed by updating the motherboard drivers or BIOS to the latest versions (but this doesn't always work). I don't know how to update the motherboard drivers on a laptop (does this even make sense?), and the BIOS is already at its latest version.

Many people (using desktop systems) report that there is NO problem when running XP, ONLY Vista, just as I found, and conclude that therefore the problem resides in the way Vista handles IRQ or video memory or some such. Note that Vista uses a new basic VGA driver called VGASAVE which is supposed to be better than the basic XP vga driver, and that this may be part of the problem. You can't disable it without disabling the display entirely, however, so that is not an option.

Can anyone with more technical knowledge than me suggest a way of fixing this, short of waiting for MS to release some sort of update (which will take who-knows how long ).