I've had the exact same issues. After waking up i had over 20000 bombs! At first I uninstalled Catalyst (as I were using beta drivers) and installed the official ones, but now I can't even get bitminter started AT ALL. I see the logo, then it disappears and I get a java exception error in a logfile, that's all. I've reinstalled drivers, java, tried manual launch, tried various Java versions, everything. Nothing works. All over java applications works just fine, so does gaming etc. But bitminter fails.
I've cleared java caches, had bitminter redownloaded, tried both beta and official bitminter... everything.
Here's an exempt of the error log I get:
#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
# EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x00000000, pid=7356, tid=6532
#
# JRE version: 7.0_15-b03
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (23.7-b01 mixed mode windows-x86 )
# Problematic frame:
# C 0x00000000
#
# Failed to write core dump. Minidumps are not enabled by default on client versions of Windows
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
# http://bugreport.sun.com/bugreport/crash.jsp
# The crash happened outside the Java Virtual Machine in native code.
# See problematic frame for where to report the bug.
#
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