I made the mistake to build a media-center, NAS, media-player based on Intel I3 3225 (HD4000) and Gigabyte H77N board. My "server/player" is always ON.
I have the same issues as above and in addition if I left the XBMC running as a front end for over than 12-24 hours, the Windows 7 GUI (aero or not) gets corrupted and all the UI components are all tear apart.
This corruption issue happens even with the latest Windows update driver (December 2012) and is more noticeable with the latest version from their site, actually with the latest drivers XBMC is not even usable.
I'm totally frustrated. I planned this setup for mounts and invested a lot of money and I had to choose between AMD APU an i3 for power efficiency. Now my system is not usable at all. I can't VNC or Remote Desktop after the UI corruptions appears. I had to setup a SSH server on windows in order to restart, gracefully, the OS to recover. Not to mention time lost on tracking the issue, tens of system-forced restart. Once one of my raid 5 drives was corrupted, I almost lost my raid data.
My current workaround is to exit from XBMC after using it. However, if I forget to close XBMC, my system is unusable and I need to force shutdown. What is the point of media center if I can't use the front end.
I am afraid that this issue is due to hardware problems Intel tries to hide, otherwise I suppose they could provide a quick fix, right. It looks to me that Intel is going on Nokia, Rim and MS's path. They are in top position and don't fight too hard to stay there.
I'm waiting for a solution before going on the other side.
Thanks.