There has been a recent trend with all of the newer games I have purchased. I recently got Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion Game of the Year Edition, and after only 4 to 5 minutes of play, it would freeze up, character models and all. I'd have to Ctrl Alt Delete it and wait about 3 minutes before the task manager would show up and then end the task, which took another 3 or so minutes. I tried several things, updating all of my drivers, downgrading the drivers, reinstalling Oblivion, using an official patch, using an unofficial patch, yet it still continued to crash. A couple times a dialog box would pop up and say "Nvidia display driver stopped working", and then my monitor would just turn black. I had to give my system a hard shut down on every occurance.

Similar thing happened on Batman Arkham Asylum Demo I got off of Steam. The opening cutscene worked just fine, but in game it seemed a little slow. After a few minutes, it just froze up, then I got a BSOD and my system restarted.

Similar thing happened to Dragon Age Origins. The opening cutscene worked just fine, and as soon as I got to the character select screen, I couldn't move my cursor at all, and then I got a BSOD and my system restarted.

Every time this happens, be it Oblivion, Dragon Age Origins or Arkham Asylum, whenever I come back to my desktop, I have to use the "Active Desktop Restore Wizard" in order to get my wallpaper back up for some reason. The music for the games also doesn't stutter or skip whenever they crash, it just keeps going, save for Oblivion, where it goes on for about 5 seconds and it fades out.

Here are my Specs:

Windows XP Media Center Edition Service Pack 2
AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3400+
2.19 GHz 3.25 GB of RAM
NVidia Geforce 9800 GT Graphics Card


Does anybody have any ideas as to what could be going wrong?