"Now you calling NVIDIA's screwup with the infinite loop EVEN with ATi's long past of subpar drivers?"
Well, I have been using a couple Radeon 64mb VIVO's for more than a year now, and I've never had any issues with drivers in any OS. Granted, I really never used the VIVO features, so there could have been problems with that part of the drivers, but like I said, I never used those features. Anyways, I finally decided to upgrade to a Gainward 128mb GF3 Ti200, and it is a very nice card that overclocks well. The card was great until I started playing any DX games. I would either crash out with the "infinite loop" message, or programs like 3DMark2k1 would give me weird messages about the window losing focus. I did some research, and it seems this "inifinite loop" deal is fairly common, and as of now, there is no real fix. I finally resolved my issue by dropping my AGP to 2X, but that is something I never, ever needed to do with my Radeon's...even @ high FSB's like 165mhz. I had to go through several drivers, Via service packs, and a few "memory patches" that actually made things worse.
Now, most people would agree that Nvidia's driver team is one of the best, if not the best in the business, but this problem seems to keep hanging around... I still had this problem with the most recent 27.10's and 27.20's. I would think a team that is so good at writing drivers would be able to figure out what's up and fix it... And worse yet, their "Official" 23.11's are the worst of the bunch..at least for me. So, ATI's history nonwithstanding, in my experience, I have had much less trouble with my ATI cards and their drivers than with Nvidia. Just my experience...