Calibration Mystery

[Wally]

So I'm having a few problems with my calibration.  I've calibrated my screen today and was happy with the results.  Photos look good and match my prints.  Photoshop started playing up (wasn't displaying levels data after making quick selection and levels adjustment layer) so I restarted my PC and now everything looks hideously washed out and desaturated.  I've run through your sRGB trouble shooter which tells me my colour profile is set correctly.  I've run the SpyderX software to make sure it hasn't mysteriously swapped to a different profile but it is still set to the profile I created earlier today (that looked fine).  Do you have any suggestions on what to check next?

[Damien Symonds]

Wow.  Sounds like a graphics card freak-out?

[Wally]

I too am thinking its a hardware issue.  I have calibrated again.  I also ran COLORCPL and switched between 3 profiles.  The one I've been using for the last month, the one I created earlier today that was fine until I rebooted and the one I just created out of desperation to get this fixed.  All 3 look the same.  All of my photos that looked fine yesterday with a saturation adjustment layer set to 8 or 9 now need to be up around 20 to look anywhere near the same.  

What I don't understand is how my SpyderX is calibrating the desaturated screen and telling me its displaying 100% or sRGB and 99% or Adobe RGB accurately.  Shouldn't the calibration come up with some sort of anomaly if I have a hardware issue? 

[Damien Symonds]

Yeah, I would have thought so too!  Somehow the calibrator must be reading the correct colours, but then the screw-up happens afterwards.