This is more of a post complaining than it is asking for help/advice.

Screen corruption has been a problem with every version of the nVidia driver's I've used, with the possible exception of the default ones Microsoft ships with Vista. I've tried whatever it was just before the 100.65s, then I tried the 100.65s, 101.70s and now 158.18. The problem has not gotten any better throughout all of these revisions.

http://gammaxi1275.googlepages.com/IMG_0354.JPG
This is what you see when Vista asks for your permission to do something. Notice how the continue button isn't even visible initially.

http://gammaxi1275.googlepages.com/IMG_0355.JPG
Now the continue button appears when the mouse is hovered over where you guess the button to be.

Hardware involved here is a eVGA 7800gs co AGP card. The pictures were taken with 158.18 drivers. The corruption isn't usually capturable with print screen, although after an "episode" with VLC it was and I got a screenie of it shoot me a message if you want to see it, but it contains some text that violates the TOS of this board. Basically everything is not displaying except the taskbar, and a few items I've drug the mouse over.

http://gammaxi1275.googlepages.com/IMG_0357.JPG
http://gammaxi1275.googlepages.com/IMG_0356.JPG
That is what happens if you open an app that drops Vista into Classic mode, the app that caused that was Trillian. On the right side of that 2nd pic was my Trillian buddy list AFTER I had minimized it. It shows up all washed out white in that pic because of the horrible lighting conditions for a digital camera shot, but in reality it was displaying the buddy list in a somewhat readable format (text was clear, just parts of the list missing).

http://gammaxi1275.googlepages.com/IMG_0358.JPG
Login screen.

I don't know what NVIDIA is "fixing" in these continually updated drivers, I glance over their documented changes when I update them, but it seems like they are fixing minor issues and adding features rather than tackling a real problem here.

There is nothing wrong with the card (runs perfect in XP) and there are no temperature/overheating issues. About the only other thing I can think of is a bios issue and I may start slowly looking into that. But a quick google search reveals there are tons of people having problems with drivers.

Edit 1: Added 2 more pictures
Edit 2: Added login screen pic
Update: Flashed to latest motherboard BIOS, no difference.

Perhaps your trouble is elsewhere. nVidia is universally rated by users (including this forum) as the best for video cards and for drivers. We see no special problems between VISTA and nVidia...
There are always troubles that crop up because video graphics cards are so fragile, but I would not consider a blanket indictment of nVidia as valid.
I would be more likely to consider power supply and memory.

Perhaps...I'd still think drivers though.

I can assure you the problem is not power supply or ram related. RAM tests fine with memtest, and I've got a 485W Enermax Noisetaker II power supply. It runs fine in XP.

As for drivers nVIDIA does make great graphics cards and good drivers. Yet recently they have been lacking somewhat. Still Vista is new deal with the initial problems!

It is Nvidia drivers and Vista especially in their 8800 cards. This has been a problem posted all over the internet.

There was an issue with fan speed control and vista I remember...

Download something that allows you to monitor the temp of the card in both XP and vista, plus RPM of fan...

Remember that Vistas desktop is rendered by the card...

To me it really looks like a overheating issue...

Got a PCI-E 7900GT myself with no problems in Vista, though it's watercooled :D

It doesn't do it in games (C&C3) so I think that removes overheating right there. If not I have more information to back that up:

Occurs on bootup at the login screen, from a cold boot - See pic above.

Does fine in the desktop, never a problem until a message box asking for permission pops up.

Doesn't do it on all message boxes, only vista ones (that wouldn't relate to temp but whatever)

Goes absolutely ape if an app switches it over to 'classic' mode, so bad its unreadable and often unrecognisable (things don't redraw if you move a window), and occationally vista won't kick out of classic when the app is closed, which is why I don't have a picture of that happening - I really don't want to deal with getting it back in aero and cleaned up if it doesn't do it automatically. If you guys absolutely need proof though I can take pics, even record a video, but you should believe me I have no reason to lie.

And why did you get vista again?

And why did you get vista again?

LOL!

Seriously, though, there are so many people experiencing issues with Vista it is a wonder more people don't wait until SP1 comes out. Of course, when it comes to Laptops or PC builders like HP, Dell, etc., the average consumer has no choice.

Lets not clutter this thread with anti Vista talk, we have Meeting Spot and a thread in there for such talk. But for a quick answer - why not? I've got an Athlon 64 box dual booting XP and Ubuntu, a G3 Tower running Panther (10.3.9), a Pentium D box as a dedicated media center running XP Media Center Edition, a Powerbook G4 running Tiger (10.4.9), and a K62 running Windows 2000.

Have you tried the latest drivers yet, SNGX? There are reports of them fixing these display corruption issues. A lot of other issues still remain though. Just read the Release Notes. There are so many issues, mainly with games, that are still not fixed.

Yes, I'm on the ones released the 17th. Tried whatever was before the 100.65, the 100.65, 101.70, and 158.18 (april 17th release). If anything it was worse with 101.70 and 158.18 than earlier, but even the early ones weren't flawless. I'm also doing a control panel uninstall of the drivers and rebooting before installing newer. Although this last one had a built in uninstaller/reboot install with it.

Try that latest beta drivers off guru3d.com

though it sounds wierd that you would have this problem through so many driver releases

Maybe it's another driver causing it... Got your mobo drivers and stuff installed?

Yes, running the latest chipset drivers from motherboard manufacturer's site. Latest bios too.

Guru3d doesn't have any newer drivers than the 158.18 release that came out yesterday from nvidia. I've been watching this problem pretty seriously since the 100.65s and since then there have only been 2 releases the 101.70 and 158.18 (no idea why the huge jump in numbers - its not even a 8 series only set).

What if you keep Vista in "classic" desktop mode?

I believe it is horrible all the time, but I don't know if I've selected classic before the forced classic switch. I'll troubleshoot more in about 3-5 hours when I get off work. But there are leaked 165.01 drivers out I've discovered ->

Windows XP 165.01 only: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=62SSG7NR
Windows Vista 32 165.01 only: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KFE5BZP8
Windows Vista 64 165.01 only: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1ST1ON40
All in 1 file: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2HI42FPE

I can't vouch for the safety of those so download at your own risk. I'll be giving them a shot after work.

Edit - Real life got in the way of playing with toys, I'll test it another day.

Edit 3: Mict - Switching to classic manually still causes the exact same corruption, so bad I literally have to guess where things are to get it back.

Does XP and Vista show the same kind of driver in Device Manager's "System Devices" section for AGP controller?

When the card worked (possibly) with the Microsoft's own driver, was VIA's chipset driver installed at that point?

I don't think it would hurt to try to change the AGP driver to Microsoft's own.

1. Don't know. Will check.

2. Don't think so.

3. Will give that a shot.

And why did you get vista again?
Well, it's everyone's right to choose to run or not run Vista, isn't it?
Personally, I wouldn't know why I would even consider trying Vista; I'm just not interested.
But--Your Mileage May Vary.

Now, as you have probably figured out by now, I won't be of much help with any Vista issues, so I'll just shut up now. ;)

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.

Does that mean the title of this thread needs to be changed? ;)

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

Nice fix SNGX :D !

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.

If the game was working fine, it's probably a conflict between the Vista interface and the drivers. BTW, how're the ATi drivers? Anyone had corruption on Vista? For the one week I used Vista on my PC, I had no corruption, but I did have a lot of BSODs.

All the rush to have Vista is so sickening. Now all the GPU companies are trying to develop drivers for Vista instead of developing good drivers for XP. Wait until SP1 for Vista is my moto :). check out ---www.lost.eu/42bbb---

Stupid thing.........I tried the fix, and it doesn't work :( . What happens is that when installing new drivers, it will either go black on install and not come back or it will work but will be black on reboot :mad: !

Just about has to be a defective card.

Nope....fine in Xp :unch: !

Just installed with a later date Windows Vista, and I still get the same problem.....stuck in 1024x768 :mad: .

We never thought it was Windows VISTA. It is either the video card, the video card drivers, or memory.

It's the driver.....but I've tried a few of them, and I still get the same problem. I know some earlier versions of Vista had a resolution problem.

NVidia has gone to a great deal of work to repair and replace all the drivers.
First, remove the drives in the Device manager and give VISTA the opportunity to replace them when you reboot via a cold boot.
If not, remove and reseat the video card.
Then try the downloaded drivers once more.

We never thought it was Windows VISTA. It is either the video card, the video card drivers, or memory.
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.

We just do not see those problems with VISTA in our installs or repairs involving nVidia devices. It must be quite rare... Sometimes there are issues with a few other video cards... and we have seen a cases where nVidia upgraded its drivers online.

what if you have a driver that won't uninstall when you try to remove it from the programs list?

nVidia is universally rated by users (including this forum) as the best for video cards and for drivers. We see no special problems between VISTA and nVidia...
nVidia drivers responsible for nearly 30% of all crashes in Windows Vista (2007).
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsible-for-nearly-30-of-vista-crashes-in-20/

Things are better now, I'm sure, but don't conclude a single company makes the 'best' drivers, hands down...

http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/03/3-27-08-vista-crash.jpg

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.