Having installed the 175.16

HowardOn my Vista32 I also must use the 169.25 drivers. I have heard of others in the same boat (plane?).Bob

Check and see if your motherboard chipset drivers are up to date. Since everything runs through your motherboard, the motherboard chipset drivers should be installed and up to date. Otherwise, this can lead to system instability. According to Nvidia website, the 175.19's are the best drivers for your OS. I would continue to get these drivers installed properly. I found the best way to get rid of old drivers is not through the Add/Remove program but through the Device Manager. Open the System Device Manager, goto your display adapter, right click and select Uninstall. It will then ask you if you want to delete all the software from your system related to this driver and you should select Yes. The system will shut down and restart. At restart the system VGA drivers will be installed. Now you can install the Nvidia drivers. I use to use a driver cleaner program but found this method of uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers is just as effective and I have yet to see the "display driver has stopped responding and has started again" error message. These BSOD's and error messages you are receiving are not necessarily the cause of bad display drivers or bad installation of the drivers. These problems can be caused by lack of sufficient memory too (on the graphics card and system memory). You should make sure your system memory is being managed by the system in your Performance settings. Some people set their own system page file setting and most have problems. Next, turn down the sliders in your FSX configuration. You have a nice system but it's still not powerful enough to run FSX with the sliders set at or near the max. Save your current FSX configuration and give it a name. Then return all the settings back to the default (a restore to default is located at each Tab). Now run FSX. See if the BSOD's and display errors continue. If so, turn down the sliders a bit more, maybe turn off all AI traffic and autogen and see if that doesn't resolve the problem. It should or you probably have defective memory modules or a system problem that requires to be fixed. Lastly, this problem is not associated just with FSX. It happens with a lot of games that are CPU/GPU intensive. If you want to read more possible solutions and discussions to this problem, I suggest you simply cut and paste the following in a Google search box: nvlddmkm has stopped working AND/OR display driver has stopped working and has restarted againHope this helps.Jim

Two suggestions:(1) Install the 177.92 drivers: they made a big difference in smoothness on my PC and others have reported similar results; and(2) If that doesn't help then - and I know it sounds un-related - try cutting back your overclock to 3.8GHz.Tim

Thanks for your replies so far. I've downloaded the latest chipset drivers and will try the latest nvidia driver with them using the uninstall technique suggested.What is not clear to me is why the latest ones are unstable on my system but the old ones are not. If it was a hardware problem would'nt they all be unstable? Maybe the 64 bit versions of the latest drivers are unstable.I am not totally convinced that I should reduce my overclock to run the later drivers (sort of cutting my nose off to spite my face) although you may be correct in the outcome. I think I prefer the extra 200Mhz.The main point I am making is that MS receive the crash reports back from users and presumably know where stabilty problems exist. Is that the reason why they stick with 169.25's or is it just an administrative issue and they have not got around to updating their driver updates yet?

For what it's worth I'll tell you my guess: I think that the newer drivers sometimes tend to push the GPU harder than older ones: that is certainly the impression I have received from the incremental improvements delivered by successive versions. I suspect that the extra stress this imposes on an overclocked system exposes underlying instabilities which might otherwise have remained hidden.My evidence for this theory is that I could run FSX with my E8500 at 4GHz quite happily - but oddly enough it couldn't run Prime95 or the Everest stress test for more than a few minutes without getting an FPU error. But then I upgraded my Nvidia drivers (I can't remember exactly from which to which). I noticed a smoother display - not so much higher FPS, actually, just somehow snappier and less jittery - but I started getting application crashes. Easing back the overclock to 3.8GHz solved both the crashes AND the Prime95/Everest problems.I could have tried fiddling some more with the voltages etc to try to keep 4GHz, but I'm only a reluctant overclocker and for me the extra 200MHz - though nice to have - didn't make enough difference to justify the extra hastle. Besides, I've now jumped ship to another new PC with an E8600 and better RAM.Finally, in my view, the overall experience of using FSX with 177.92 drivers was better at 3.8GHz than with older drivers at 4GHz. But that may be because of my perspective. I judge performance by how well a PC handles the "heavies" in and out of places like the Aerosoft Heathrow 2008X, where even at 4.3GHz (or higher) on my new PC I struggle to get over 17fps on the ground in cloudy weather with the high graphics settings that I like to use. Here, it seems, all I can hope for is "smoothness" - and with my 8800 Ultra, the later drivers deliver more of it than the earlier ones.Tim

I'm ruuning the nVidia 175.16 64bit International whql drivers on my Vista 64x with a 8800GTS card and havn't had any problem whatsoever, well not up to now. In fact the whole system is much more stable than when I ran FSX on my XP machine.Trouble is that there are so many variables HW and SW on PC's thease days what's good for one may not be so good for others.Phil

"The main point I am making is that MS receive the crash reports back from users and presumably know where stabilty problems exist. Is that the reason why they stick with 169.25's or is it just an administrative issue and they have not got around to updating their driver updates yet?"The latest released driver (178.13) is WHQL certified. So it was tested and approved by MS as well as many other drivers since the 169.25. The 178.13's are the latest WHQL certified drivers for your Vista 64 and I would install them if I had that OS (I have the 32 bit). IMHO, I believe the 169.25's were the first WHQL certified drivers that really worked with Vista. I think the 161.xx driver was the one that fixed the infamous "display driver has stopped responding and has restarted again" error (well, not for everyone but most anyway). The 169's further resolved this issue. Later Nvidia WHQL releases haven't made everyone happy and, in some cases, users see more problems. So I think MS is just staying with the 169's as they work best for the majority. If you want to upgrade to a later driver, you can but the 169.25 WHQL driver is sufficient and will provide outstanding performance after Vista is installed. I get frustrated with Dell when I go on their website and look for updates and see they haven't updated the original video drivers sent with the system. So I just look for BIOS updates and move on.Jim