Jeripop

Hi again Goober.
I read all your progress so far and two things came to mind. One was that you are using driver sweeper. I have never used that so I am not sure what it's like. I have been using Driver Cleaner Pro and I am hoping that you might give that a go.

Second one is a bit more scary. What power supply are you using? Can you tell me in basic watts and a brand name? Eg. Antech true power 650 watt etc? Reason I ask is because your machine is exhibiting behavior to that of a power supply that is faulty or cannot supply enough power to your video card. Some supplies can do this with age but most just flat out die with no warning at all.

Also, what other stuff are you running in your machine? Fans, Hard drives, USB peripherals etc. Just trying to narrow this down for you a bit. Will check back when i get home from work.

EDIT: Never mind telling me about what else you are running as i saw what I was after in your earlier post. One other thing springs to mind. Have you tried disabling your sound card in device manager and starting the game to see what happens? I know it sounds silly but I have seen creative cards do this from time to time too. Definately worth a look before you put too much blame on the video card.

Hi Goober, I hope this might help.
I had a similar problem to what you are experiencing and here's what I did.
Grab yourself a free copy of Driver Cleaner Pro. You can just google it and get a tonne of hits. Uninstall all your Nvidia stuff through control panel and that goes for everything, stereo, wdm, 3d drivers, physx etc. Reboot for good measure and run driver cleaner. Ask it to delete everything it can find related to Nvidia. Reboot and reinstall your nvidia drivers.

This should give you a nice clean driver install and hopefully solve your problem. Will check back later to see how you went.