i installed the latest drivers and after restarts i didnt and still have not had an error. should i still remove them and reinstall 4.49????

If you don't have any problems, leave it as it is.

Why did you upgrade to the 4.50 from 4.49 in the first place ?

uninstall them and go back to your old ones.

Via has taken them off their site due to problems w/ this set of drivers.

I always wait a week or two until after the release to be sure on new chipset and video driver releases

usually i wait a week aswell i didnt look at the date when i downloaded them as i was in a rush to go out for dinner.

I usually see if it's necessary to upgrade to newer drivers before even thinking about doing it. If I don't have any problems with my current drivers, heck they can stay for the next 3 years.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it..."

Yeah I only install new drivers if they claim to be beneficial. all those stories of v4.5 are terrifing. I installed them and had no probs but went back to v4.49 just in case.

The error those drivers had occurred in machines with more than 1 GB of memory, ATI graphics card and AGP aperture larger than 32 MB.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12951

Apparently Via did a quick fix on the 4.51 drivers by defaulting the aperture to 32mb. Wouldn't that end up hurting performance in certain situations though ?

Depends on those certain situations, naturally

I've never noticed AGP aperture doing anything.