Changed the setting , I assumed (wrongly ?) that I needed Google Chrome installed so I installed it
Yes. That was incorrect. Chromium is not the same thing as Chrome. MC includes the engine required, but it is disabled by default on Windows.
Theater View is not HTML generated, and doesn't use the web components at all. Some elements of Standard View are web elements, though, such as:
* Playlist headers
* The Start page
* Other informational displays
The only way that the web engine could impact this is if the bug happens when exiting "normal" mode with a web-view showing and enters Direct3D (the problem is the transition, and is impacted by state before and after). Possible, but I'd bet it is more likely to be the GPU driver flaking out in Direct3D.
It isn't clear at all what you mean by all of the Administrator stuff at all. Please explain further. This behavior should have nothing to do with any of the Media Center
Users. If you are talking about a user account on the system (in Windows) then that's something else. But if this has any impact at all, then it sounds like you're having issues with the computer generally.
However, I'll say again, the "blackness" you've described is almost certainly a hardware fault. If your computer is
ever crashing so badly (when entering Direct3D that it goes black like that and you lose all mouse control and you have to do a system interrupt (control-alt-delete) to "unstick" it, it is almost certain
that is a driver or hardware issue. Media Center can only call the Direct3D APIs, and the driver is supposed to do what it is supposed to do. It is possible that it is a bug in MC, but it is
much more likely that it is a bug in the driver (or failing hardware, though with the multiple reports, this is less likely) that MC has not worked around. Intel's GPU drivers have been notoriously bad and difficult to deal with in 3D for a LONG, LONG, LONG time.
If it was me, and I had the time to put into testing, I'd do the following:
1. Normalize as much as is possible about your installation. Run on a well-used, well-defined user account on the machine. Run MC with a small Library (just a handful of well-known test files) with as close to default settings as is possible.
2. Test.
3. Remove your GPU driver entirely.
4. Reboot.
5. Test.
6. Install an old version of the Intel GPU driver (close to the time when your hardware was first supported).
7. Reboot.
8. Test.
9. Repeat 6-8 for successive versions of the Intel GPU driver and see if the behavior changes.