Latest Nvidia Driver Issue? Or?

So... I installed the latest Nvidia drivers on my gaming rig yesterday (3.96 or something like that... I can look it up if needed) and today it is not happy. The desktop is generally okay, but on starting City of Heroes, things get glitchy when you go into character select and things start getting animated. I'll get flickering bars on the screen and sometimes the game will crash there (after blocky or disfigured images on the screen), or it will crash the game once I've loaded in on a character. I've also had two blue screens of doom when I was just on the desktop.

I assumed this was a driver issue and rolled them back. No change. I had installed the drivers via Windows and did it from Nvidia this time. I uninstalled the drivers, restarted, installed the new drivers, restarted, and had the same issues in CoH and another game I tried. Some forums out there had people talking about dust and heat issues for my symptoms, so I cleaned out my computer (it was due anyway), pulled out my card and blew it out/vacuumed it well.

I was thinking that did it for a bit when I turned it back on. The desktop was fine and City of Heroes was too, but then after a few minutes in game, the flickering and bars were back and the game crashed.

Any ideas on what I can do further? Should I install older drivers? This Tom's Hardware page suggests Nvidia drivers can have issue with 64bit systems and to try drivers from guru3d.com. Is that worth a go? Any ideas would be nice. I am thinking of getting a new card as it is, but it's be nice to have my computer working until then and I'm not sure if this is a problem with the card or something else anyway.

I tried the new ones too, but they caused a few probs so I rolled back to the previous one.
You might want to try uninstalling the drivers (have the drivers that worked for you ready on your desktop). Restart your puter into safe mode and use a program called Driver Sweeper (it's free) to remove all traces of the old driver.
Driver Sweeper
Restart again and install the drivers from your desktop. If that doesn't work it might mean your card is starting to fail...artifacts in your games are always a good indication. Good luck Grey, and I hope this works for you!

Well, after far too many hours of uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, then actually adjusting my registry a bit, the verdict is that the card is dying. Nice that I was thinking about upgrading anyway, but still. Thanks for the help.