Originally posted by: Mem
Also overclocked video cards can cause this problem too,underclocking fixes it.
that is a false statement. it is directly inacurate and/or at best based on heresay and no facts whatsoever and it obviously comes fro ma person taht is compeltely clueless with regards to this issue.
i also had this problem, the following is how it all went down:
in february / march i built a whole new system: core 2 duo 6800, 4 ggis of corsair 1066 twin ram, evga nf680i SLI board, a single evga GF8800 ultra /w 768 megs. s/b x-fi, nice HD and DVD-RW drive to go with it.
everything was cool until about 2 montsh ago when all of a sudden i got that error and all my 3d apps started crashing, even screensavers and websites that were using 3d modeling.
i wasted at 1st about a week and maybe 60 hours updating all drivers, bios-es, manually deletign nvddmkm files, had to learn vista security, account menagement and all taht kidna stuff, cause otehrwise you cant touch all of them anyways. did virus scans, spyware scans, purchased 3rd party software to perform additional scans, etc etc etc. also, beware, the generic "update your drivers" advice in this case is the worst and most wrong thing to follow. updating drivers just makes this worse and happen more often, not less.
after that i finally caved in and backed up any important stuff i had and did a full complete format on my HD. i figured whatever was wrong with it, it all started with a driver update taht i performed when i purchased and installed bioshock. so i thought it was software and thought a clean wipe would fix it.
after compelte hard format reinstall of vista 64 lo and behold it came right back up. on a clean install, nothing but the vid card plugged in and keyboard and using the drivers latest WHQL drivers posted / linked by microsoft to be the latest certified nvidia drivers.
even reformat didnt help.
nvidia support is compeltely useless and rude about it, they flat out deny the issue exists and keep pointing fingers at the rest of the system and microsoft. microsoft keeps pointing fingers at nvidia. and evga, the manufacturer keeps pointing fingers at the both of them, as a result i am still fu@ked along with everyone else havign thsi problem.
after a while i caved in again and blew about $250 and picked up ATI Radeon 2600 XT at fry's.
the nvlddmkm went away but ....
now i have the missing texture problem that is so prominent on ATI cards, especially in dx 10 games. i instaleld the missign texture fix from the ATI website but it seems after the fix you can only run those games in low settings and low rez. i have a widescreen high rezz HD monitor and like to run my games at max. so their fix is pointless. ATI support, like nvidia is apathetic, in denial "its noit us its you" standard PR bullshiht mode.
as a result of all of this, i have a nice $700+ P.O.S. nvidia garbage lying in my drawer and another cheapo card in my comp that runs only half the games i wanna run.
i deeply regret ever beign tempted with switchign to win vista, dx10, and 4 ggis of ram so i had to go 64 bit further minimizing hardware choices and software options as well.
i am sorry this happened to you, my nvidia card seems to be now permamently damaged hardware wise. it now has a lot of weird artifacts, pixelization errors, missing / corrupted textures etc., even durign the short periods of time before the error comes back, nothing is playable on it.
i have no solution for you. i know few people had some limited sucess with the following: geting better quality power supplies and making sure they got high quality current coming across both the 12v rails taht plug into the vid card, rolling back teh drivers a few versions, 1.58 i think or lower + manually deleting ALL the old nvlddmkmk files and some related including from the vista backup and restore dirs, which will require a large amount of wasted time on learnign the ins and outs of vista security and features to accomplish. you have to do this before you install that 1.5xxx driver.
again, that is limited on case-by-case sucess, some have been sucessfull some havent, about 50/50.
good luck man.