This happens to me a lot. Much of time it happens while having STO open while minimized.

I've got the 2010 graphics driver installed and tried those suggestions somewhere else on the forum and STILL no joy my going to have to abandon this game because its becoming a pain in the neck which is a shame cause i like it alot

Even if the software was written maliciously, with the intent to crash (which it wasn't), the kernel side of the driver should simply not be able to crash regardless of what bad input is fed into it through DirectX. We HAVE seen plenty of crashes on the user-mode side of the driver, some of which have been our fault and some of which have been faulty drivers, but this is different.

The reason we're seeing it now is that legitimate shader changes in Season 7 may be causing a driver issue to manifest itself that was not before.

One way or another, the issue is happening within the kernel mode driver - something we don't have access to in order to debug. Only Intel can fix that. Even in the case where there's bad code on the side of Cryptic's engine, the only way a crash like this can happen is if there is ALSO bad code in Intel's driver.

I know what the problem is with this I've had it on this back up computer thats sort of on its last leg where a portion of the motherboard got overheated a few years ago. The problem is which the OP probally has is that is one of their plugins is constantly crashing like this PC I have does where the screen will go black and once the plugin restarts it will then start functioning normally. Sometimes what I have to do is reinstall the flash plugins when this happens frequently.

So how does a noob like me install all these toys

usually mine when i re-install adobe flash player and then alt+tab between the desktop to STO then it clears this black screen.

I don't think so. You have to realize that this is not happening to just one person. This is happening across a huge spectrum of players, and it is happening even when the game is run in safe mode. My computer is not 'on its last leg' with an 'overheating motherboard' as you suggest, nor, would I venture to guess, are many of the other computers this is being affected by, as at least one report suggests that this epic crash is happening on a computer someone just bought last month.

I used a program called gamebooster (Use google lol) last night and ran STO and there wasnt a problem but it did crash a little during a ground mission so be careful if you guys use it

I'm thoroughly pissed about this isue and ready to give up at this point.I've been playing the game since April of 2011.I've spent quite a bit of money on the game and pay tri-monthly because I fell madly in love with the game.It seems that maybe they have begun to address the problem and sounds as if it may not be a quick fix.But for people like myself who have invested so much time and money into the game and to keep having the issue pop up time and time again without a resolution,especially after over a month,is pretty awful.The game is pretty much null for any action except to log in and check on Doff missions.Cryptic and PWE,I offically give you one more Month to correct the problem or this is one less paying cutomer you will have.(that is being pretty damn patient mind you!)

Why can't we just have an option in the setting to turn off those shader changes that were added in season 7 so that brings us back to the graphics levels of season 6, but allows people with higher end video cards to have the increased graphics?