Decided to try and mine Vertcoin, within 3 minutes of using the settings on page 1 my rig crashed. Now it locks up and crashes indefinitely when trying to mine any altcoin. I had zero problems using cgminer to mine other coins for three weeks straight.
Also, just tried to play a game (BF3) to test it, and the whole rig crashes immediately.
It sounds like you used settings that overclocked your video card too high. Use Saphinre Trixx or some similar program to make sure your clock rates are normal. cgminer doesn't reset the block back down when it exits (except maybe in latest version), and that won't happen if cgminer crashed. If you are too over clocked then you'll keep having problems in video games, mining other things, etc until you move your speeds back down.
I didn't see any cgminer settings on page one so I don't know if they included overclocking or not.
Edit: If you mean the settings in the first post of
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=416572then yeah, the clock speeds he sets there are perhaps be too high for your video card. Make sure you aren't still at those speeds.