I have a hunch that maybe two different versions of Cg are interacting badly. Using filemon, have you checked to see what copy of cgGL.dll it’s using?
PS. This is a fundamental windows problem: there’s no way that I know of to tell it to use a particular version of Cg. It just searches your path and uses the first thing it finds. Usually, I solve this problem by renaming DLLs - for example, in the panda bin directory you’ll find “libpandatiff”, “libpandassl”, and so forth, to avoid conflicts with some other libtiff or libssl that you may have installed. But I can’t rename the Cg DLLs because nvidia hasn’t given me any way to do that - no source, etc.
hopefully you did not delete them 100% because unlike panda some game put the cg.dll there and when you start it again it will be gone or different version! welcome to DLL hell
I would classify that as a real serious bug in Panda3D. It’s supposed to be resistant to that sort of DLL Hell. I’m going to get to work on that right away.