I don't think MC is corrupting drivers.
I see this error from time to time, less now than I used to though. Here's what I think is happening (which is very likely to be wrong!):
The drivers can only talk to one program at a time, so in effect a PVR program 'takes over' the tuner when it starts an instance of TV watching/recording. I see a failed to connect or timeout error in MC when I have DVBViewer open, and closing down DVBViewer will allow me to then watch TV with MC. Also vice versa, if I'm recording or watching TV with MC, then DVBViewer fails to initialize and I get a black screen.
Now occasionally MC used to crash whilst trying TV (I think it was lavcuvid that was the culprit, but that is just my hunch). And any TV, whether in MC or DVBViewer wouldn't work after - it was as though MC had initialized the tuner, but couldn't then release it (or initialise another tuner). Just a reboot would cure it for me. There was a phase where I had to reboot a couple of times for MC TV to work, but that was rare. With the latest beta 17.0.46 it is hugely more stable for me.
If you have MC set to autostart on boot, and you have a recording programmed in, MC will again automatically try to 'restart' the recording. Occasionally this seemed to bungle the tuner up, maybe because it hadn't fully reset, dunno. All I did in this situation was cancel any due recordings and then reboot. Or I could unset MC from autoloading on boot.
I have been testing DVB-T2 betas over the past few weeks and getting an awful lot of problems needing reboots and this kind of error in MC, sometimes thinking my card/driver was borked, but *every* time all I did was disable MC from autoloading on boot, reboot and run DVBViewer to assure myself that the card was working fine. I've not once had to reload the drivers.
I must admit that DVBViewer feels 'cleaner' in the way it 'hogs' and 'releases' the tuner card. MC sometimes runs into trouble. I think documentation from Microsoft on implementation of these interfaces is shockingly poor which is part of the problem.
SBR