WinXP Pro & Nvidia 23.11 & 27.20 crashes?? Please Help Me

My system keeps locking up and crashes with windows xp pro and the nvidia 23.11 or the 27.20 beta drivers. My system has been and is stable with the older 21.83 drivers but I need to upgrade these to run Nascar 2002 without problems with flashing textures. My video card is a Hercules 3d Prophet II Ultra. What happens is that everything starts to freeze and then I get the blue screen of death listing nv4_disp.dll as the source of the problem. Then the computer reboots. This does this no matter what I am doing and I can not seem to figure out why it does this. Hercules is always behind on releasing drivers and have always had good luck using nvidia until the 23.11 drivers. Matter of fact the latest hercules has out is 21.81 drivers. Anyone else having this problem or better yet have any ideas on what to do to solve it??

[Jason]

Install the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers, that solved my problem with the 23.11's running XP Pro... (I'm assuming you have a VIA based board).

[Drozdov]

Try doing Windows update and go to driver update, there should be an update to nvidia cards

[Jason]

But the one in the windows update is an older version... you can always find the newest WHQL NVIDIA drivers on NVIDIA's website...

[PCGenious]

Yea you should always get the latest and the greatest....heh....That rymes.

Yes it is a via chipset board but I did install via 4-n-1 4.37 drivers which is the latest at http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2. Also if you go by windows update, you will be way behind. The 23.11 is he latest drivers at the Nvidia website but there is a beta version 27.20 running around some other sites. I have tried both of these and they do the same thing... crash but I dont have any problems with the 21.83 Nvidia drivers but in certain newer games I get flashing textures and specs really bad. I am running an Aopen AK77 pro mobo with a 1800+ amd and 512 mb ddr ram. I didnt have the problems with flashing and spots with my old abit kt7a raid board and amd 1.2 ghz cpu but I did have the crashing problem with the 23.11 Nvidia drivers. I went and got another mobo (same kind and model) yesterday and same problem with the specs and flashing textures with the 21.83. I am going back to my abit boards. Just ordered the KR7A Raid-133 on the web and having it shipped. Should be here thursday to try it out.

[Jason]

Yeah, it sucks... VIA chipsets are so buggy (but for some reason we put up with it)... and NVIDIA drivers have been buggy lately (because of conflicts with VIA chipset)....

Man, back in the days hardware would work smooth as can be because it was expected to run for years and years and needed to be reliable. I think mobo chipsets started to take a downturn after the 440BX chipset. There were NO incompatibilities with the BX boards, they were rock stable.

[PCGenious]

Yea actually I have been having some compatibility issues with the via driver also.

Ok it is still happening but doesnt seem as frequent as it was. I downloaded a beta patch for the BSOD invinite loop problems and that has seemed to help more than anything. I am running them under 1280x960 at 16 bit color. Right now it seems that the main way I can get them to crash is IE6 on certain sites. First what will happen is the font disappears from the page and then the graphics start to look all messed up. Also the font on the browser toolbars also disappears including the x at the top right hand corner but the - and the square stay. The computer will get really slow and even after I close out of IE6 it continues to be this way. The desktop also is affected as is the taskbar and the start menu group. All the font disappears but the icons remain. If I let it stay it will eventually get the BSOD listing nv4_disp.dll as the source and then reboot. This only happens with the 23.11 drivers and above and I have no problems like this with the 21.83 and below drivers. The only issue I have with the 21.83 drivers is really bad flashing textures in some games of which was resolved by updating to 23.11 so this is why I really need to upgrade my drivers.

Yes there are some things I heard about XP, VIA, and Nvidia but no one seems like they are taking credit for it. Everyone wants to blame someone else. But I really feel that this problem that I am having is going to go back to a compatability issue with Nvidia drivers and something on my system. I do have a new mobo on the way and should be here thursday so hopefully maybe something there will resolve it completly. I dont feel that that is what the problem is but I am just not happy with this Aopen mobo and have decided to go back to an Abit board.