If you have an ATI Radeon 5870 and your computer is locking up on loading Windows 7, then this post may be for you. After weeks of helping a friend try to figure out what was wrong with his graphics card (and an RMA with Newegg to get another one which had the same issues), we narrowed the issue down to his monitor.  He has an Asus V222H monitor and oddly enough, if you switch from DVI to some other type of connection (VGA or HDMI) it seems to completely resolve the locking up on boot issues after he put on Catalyst 10.x drivers.

Who knows, maybe this will work for someone else as well!  So in short, if you can’t get Catalyst 10 drivers installed, try swapping to a different source input on your monitor, especially if you have an Asus Monitor!