Irritating Comp Restarts

[Spike]

A friend of mine i built a computer for is having some odd issues, when ever he is in game and gets a popup, or a message on aim or xfire his game minamizes and when he trys to resume it restarts his computer, no bluescreen of doom or anything it just restarts. Seeing as how i made it for gaming its a little annoying to have a problem like that. I was wondering if anyone had any clue as to what the problem/solution could be. All his drivers are up to date, he has all the xp patches, and it has this problem on every game he plays.

On a completely unrelated note:

I just managed to fix the highly annoing StartNow.HyperBar spyware that has reciently sprung up around the net, ive heard its getting around through warez so check your downloads more thourghly than ever and for any casaual netsurfer who mite be having the same problem the solution is simply mcrosofts beta anti spyware software, ironically enuff i was going to format my comp due to the annoying popups i kept getting so i said wht the heck and microsofts bets worked. i tryed ad-aware and spybot, and even manually removing the keys from my regstry to no avail. I would "kill" it and on the next restart it just came up.

 

[Grimmda]

As for your buddy's machine tell him to post in this forum himself (is what everyone here is going to say if I don't).

Next off, tell him to close those chat apps when he's gaming. Granted Xfire you listed is a gaming chat app, but maybe there's something in that app that won't accept chats if he's in a game already.

I've seen this problem before, aside from chat apps, but when you hit the windows key or ALT TAB out of the game. It has something to do with video related issues that the system will kind of "overload" and just reboot.

I was going to say make sure those video drivers are up to date but you said they are. What video card is he running? Just curious, maybe we can find more out through a google or something.

(OW it hurts when I push here... then stop pushing there!!!)

 

[Spike]

Hes running the XFX 6600 gt and as for why he doesnt post trust me theres a reason..... He barly knows how to run windows updates.....and as for the drivers i updated them personally a month agoe so they should be allrite, ill try the most current ones, maybe that will help.

Ps: thx for the input.