I am current using a Nvidia 9800 GTX/GTX+ with driver version 6.14.11.7824. It works fine at this setting. Yet whenever I try to update the driver, whether its to a more recent version or a slightly older one, my monitor will go blank after the windows splash screen. I recently had some other issues with my PC, but those were related to RAM and at this point I have updated the RAM and the blue screens from that have gone away. I was hoping that doing that would fix this issue, but obviously it has not. What might be causing this problem and how do I go about fixing it?

I suppose I should also mention that this is only when booting windows normally, I can still access safe mode perfectly fine.

Drivers make so little difference, that I would first see how it runs with the driver that works. You probably do not need to make a change. You simply will not see a reason to change unless you are changing a specific component.

well it works fine with my current driver, I suppose this is mostly a case of it not doing something, but I am more interested in the why it isn't working than any urgent need to fix it.