PPSSPP Crashing AMD Legacy Drivers Windows 7

[keketin]

This is a thread dig and a half, but after googling this problem, finding this and fixing then fixing it, I thought I'd post.

Using AMD Radeon HD 7770. Using 13-12 drivers, PPSSPP bluescreened my computer every time when 3D graphics was involved (after a string of a dozen "windows has recovered from a graphics crash" notifications).

Found this thread, couldn't find Catalyst A.I. from the settings at all.

Downgraded back to my old drivers 12-6 (oh boy is is downgrading AMD drivers a hassle and a half). Catalyst A.I. found in Catalyst Control Center -> Gaming -> 3D application settings -> Catalyst A.I., set it to "performance" and unticked "Enable Surface Format Optimization"

And bam, problem solved. Well, I don't know was downgrading the drivers good enough, I was too tired of the BSODs at that point to check. Now my computer complains about a dozen missing .exe files at boot, and there's no reference to any of them anywhere (registry or startup). I'm guessing CCC tries to start them for some reason?

The funny thing is, there used to be a "clean AMD driver removal tool" but after it was found to utterly destroy Windows8 installations, they removed the tool. Entirely. And nobody else is hosting it anywhere, EVERY place just links to AMD pages which just 404s you. So even Windows7 users are out of luck and I guess I'll just have to live with those errors. Upgrading AMD drivers, never again.