NVIDIA drivers for Vista suck (updated to include Win 7 and Server 2008 r2)

Please direct all complaints directed towards Vista to another thread, this isn't the place for that.

UPDATE!
The problem is now "fixed", how I was able to fix it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me right now, but in years of dealing with problems in Windows odd things like this tend to happen.

I first updated to the 165s, this was done without uninstalling the 158.18 drivers. I had no intention of not removing the 158s, I went under the assumption that since the 158s had a built in uninstaller for the older drivers that the 165s would as well, they did not. Once rebooted the 165s seemed possibly slightly better, the corruption went from nearly completely unusable in Classic to only slightly better than nearly completely unusable. From here on out I was keeping it in Classic mode and struggling to read the text (often times having to move the window and read the 'ghost' to make out the text).

At this point I had the idea to check and see if Rollback contained several versions (I'd seen elsewhere once in Vista where it showed what drivers were installed when) and to see if maybe I could roll back to whatever came before the 100.65s. Turns out when I clicked Rollback Driver it did what it does in XP and just went to the previous, which was the 158.18s. The corruption was still there, so before even exiting device manager I clicked uninstall driver.

Once at the login for Vista after uninstalling, it was at some horrible resolution, but the colors looked ok and the login screen had no corruption. Once at the desktop I immediately went to change the resolution, only to find out it wouldn't scale up to 1680x1050, 1440x900 or something similar was shown, so I picked it. Now with the display slightly better I decided to see what driver version Vista was using. It properly identified my card in Device Manager (so why wasn't I getting 1680x1050 like the first boot after installing Vista?) and said I was using 97.46? Then I clicked on Update Driver (from within device manager) because I'd resigned myself to having to install a newer version since I apparently removed something important that Vista wasn't going to replace. I let it connect online and to my suprise it said I was up to date.

Discouraged and and running out of lunch hour I just clicked ok and was prepared to head back to work, but then Vista said it needed to reboot for changes to be made, wtf?! The shutdown screen looked like it dropped to 8 bit color so that was a little concerning, but when Vista came back up all looked good, I was still at the 1440 resolution so I went to see if I could get it changed to 1680x1050, and sure enough I could.

I'm still in Windows Classic theme at this point, still corruption free. Expecting corruption to hit in full force at any minute I enabled the 2nd monitor (extend desktop onto this monitor) and all went well there. After closing out of that I decided to jump into Aero. That also went smoothly. Now for the big test I went back to classic. No corruption! So I jumped back into Aero and decided I'd launch Trillian which for some reason (quicktime alternative install?) only recently decided to bump Vista out of Aero. When an app forces Vista into Classic it doesn't drop to the full Windows Classic theme, instead it drops into a Vista like theme just without Aero enabled. Once again no corruption!

So I think the problem is "fixed". Now what I have to deal with is running the old 97.46? drivers. All of these nvidia updates are fixing a multitude of issues, so now I wonder how long it will be before things start crashing like everyone else that has had problems are seeing. I'm scared to update again for fear of causing the problem all over again.

My gut feeling is somehow files were still getting left behind from previous drivers, despite following nvidia's removal instructions, and that they were the root cause. I think that if I install the 158.18 drivers that I'll still be corruption free, I'm not sure I want to risk that at this point though. Maybe if things start crashing on me I will. Hopefully setting a restore point while things are working would allow me to get a corruption free desktop back if the new drivers cause problems again.

No, I don't think so, because it definately is/was a driver issue.

For a little update/confirmation that it is a driver issue.

I decided yesterday to create a restore point before mucking around with this again, hoping it would be a little more serious (since I'm not convinced rollback drivers did anything). Then I redownloaded the 158.18 drivers, and installed them. Now during this process the screens go blank (apparently on removal of the existing drivers) and then they come back, right monitor doesn't come back again indicating that it has wiped out the old drivers. But it comes back on the left monitor at a high enough resolution that it is using a driver of some sort (other than what happens if you boot in VGA mode).
At this point I didn't think to much, clicked restart when it told me I needed to. Now it it goes to the logging out screen, and the corruption is back, now I'm not sure its worse than before, but its definately there. It reboots and the login screen looks great, haven't seen that before if the drivers were messed up. But then I typed my password in and couldn't even see the characters. I'm back to the old problem again.

I can't have this, so I try to restore, and it worked. So I'm pretty pleased with how the restore worked. NVIDIA needs to get their act together on this, I won't say its inexcusable just yet because XP had infinite loop errors up until at least SP1 with NVIDIA cards. I haven't tried gaming yet, been busy with other things, but even when the corruption was bad it never interfered with C&C3, that game was corruption free.

It was and always was the drivers for me, just as the title of the thread says. Its not the card because with the default Vista drivers all is well, its not the memory because of the same reason. Also because of flawless performance in another OS.

I am confident that this is an issue much like the infinite loop issue with nvidia cards and XP when it first came out, and I don't think this will be fixed by nvidia, but I think the drivers are fully responsible for what I see based on every driver other than the default ones causing the corruption. But the problem is in the way Vista and the drivers work together. It is my belief that this will 'magically' get fixed in Vista SP1 with no formal acknowledgement that this is/was a problem.

Unfortunately for this thread, I no longer run Vista on that hardware. I have moved that VIsta license to this machine now with better hardware... Sadly, SP1 has now came out and I don't have any easy way to test my theory that it would get fixed in SP1.

I saw a very similar thing (as I noted above, post 35) happen with XP. It wasn't corruption, but it was an issue that wasn't formally recognised and then got magically fixed in SP1. I ran Whistler betas for months, never had an infinite loop issue, ran XP retail and fought them continously until SP1. I'm not sure that SP1 for Vista would fix it, but we took over 30 posts here with me giving some pretty detailed information on what caused it and what I was doing to fix it and we didn't come up with an answer. I did note that going back to the "stock" drivers fixed the issue, so that completely rules out hardware or temp issues. It IS a software issue, I don't think you can argue otherwise if you read the thread.

I know this is an old thread, and I know we have a ton of new members since then, but I wanted to give an update to this since now I can.

Turns out, I don't think Windows Vista SP1 would have fixed it, the reason I say that is because on the same machine I have tried the beta of Windows 7. Here are the results:



Now this is pretty preliminary. Unlike in Vista, once I logged in things seem to be displaying properly, although I've only been running 7 for a few minutes. Perhaps it will corrupt soon. If it doesn't, then maybe they did fix it, and just haven't fixed it during their install portion.