Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

I have a newly built PC: 2GB Kingston RAM, EVGA 8800 GTS (320 MB) VGA on Windows Vista. I was playing Medal of Honor Airborne with excellent performance until this error showed up. I played for like 6 hours before it started showing up. Now it shows up in the game and when i run Windows Media Player in full screen. Paid for Driver Cleaner .NET hoping to do a new installation of the nvida drivers (163.69) instead of the older (162.22). When I removed the old driver and before installing the new one, I was able to run a video in Windows Media Player in full screen without a problem. When there is an Nvidia Driver installed the problem returns. I also notice trails of red dots appearing when I drag any window over the desktop. Please help me solve this, does Driver Cleaner help here?

 

Firstly welcome to the site.

Now for the good news I hope. This particular error is common in the Nvidia drivers at the moment and rears it's ugly head every few sets. The previous Beta's before the 163.69's were giving me the error 10-20 times per gaming session however I have since installed the 163.69's and have yet to see the error once.
It seems largely limited to the 8800 series cards combined with Vista, if you check Vista's fault log it will have reported each occasion and you can submit these however you'll get a return message saying they are aware of it and to visit Nvidia for a fix.

 

OK, Hi.
Thanks for the reply. I have been all over the net looking for answers, I actually visited a closed thread that contains thousands of posts about the subject, complete chaos over this problem. The strange thing is that it took a while to happen to me this problem. Anyway, I recently installed nTune tools from nvidia, and so I am able to control the clock frequencies of the core and the memory of my VGA. I am not a hardcore overclocker, I am not an overclocker at all, I did not overclock this VGA, the funny part is that I had to UNDERCLOCK it!!! The factory defaults (Displayed by nTune) show 513 Mhz for the core and 792 Mhz for the Memory. I had to change the memory frequency to 740 for the Artifacts to stop showing in windows Vista, also now I have no prob with playing vids in full screen in Media Player. I have still to test this in the game itself. WHY in the world do I have to underclock my VGA!!! I can live with not overclocking it but having to underclock it is just silly!!! Why are they called factory defaults if you cannot use them in the first place???

 

Well the problem appeared again, so this time I restored an image of Windows XP (where the VGA was working well), and the same problem appeared there directly, I concluded that this is a defective hardware scenario, and I am returning the card fore replacement. I remembered something that I need to know if is relevant or not: My PSU is a Raptoxx 550 Watts, I installed Intel Desktop Utilities and they showed that the voltage goes to 0V on everything every few minutes, could it be the software going nuts? Is it even possible for the system to go to 0 V and still run?? I am trying to rule out the possibility of my PSU causing malfunctions in other hardware like my VGA, I paid considerable amount of money for this PSU compared to getting a normal with the case PSU.
Thanks