Nvidia 8800GT + Win7 Driver Hell

OK so here's my problem:

I'm running Win7x64 on a computer with a GeForce 8800GT card. I installed 7 about a month ago, and had no problem with video for a while. The video drivers installed without an issue and all was fine until about 2 weeks ago. Suddenly, I had no 3D acceleration. Windows reports a code 43 "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)" for the device. I have tried uninstalling the drivers, rebooting into safe mode, and installing the most recent drivers from Nvidia (266.58) to no avail. The drivers that Windows automatically download also result in a code 43.

I'm not sure if there are leftover components of old drivers still active on the system causing a conflict, or what. I have only ever had this problem on Windows 7, though this machine has run 7 before for over a year with no problem. Has anyone had any similar experiences? Any suggestions?

Thanks!

EDIT:

So it turned out Windows had been repeatedly installing a new driver on top of the fragments of the old one left over from uninstalls. Ugh. Gonna turn that off. I feel like a moron <_<

EDIT:

I can get the drivers to work after a reinstall for about 20 minutes. Even sitting idle after logging in, the computer freezes after a few minutes after installing graphics drivers. It's about time for an upgrade anyway, so I'll probably just buy a new card and see if I can get this one to work in my other box.

Graphics drivers are very problematic of late, nVidia or ATi and one of the most common issues is installing drivers as they intend you to - which they don't really state clearly anywhere.

I have had problems jumping drivers with ATi cards. So I had 10.4 at one point and by the time I had noticed new drivers were out was 10.9. Going from 10.4->10.9 killed it. So I had to uninstall Catalyst, roll back the driver from Device Manager, install each version from 10.4 to 10.9 to get it to install correctly.

Now I have random CPU halts as well as Adobe Flash not liking YouTube etc and freezing, which I think are graphics driver related rather than CPU related - suggests video decoding accelerated by the GPU, but still trying to find some sign that this is the problem.

Jim,

I think I found something related to the problem.

Right after posting that it was fixed, I tried to play Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam. Valve just released a new beta map, and trying to run a game in it (both the first time, which caused this problem) and again today caused the computer to freeze. Upon reboot, the graphics were fucked again.

I think I need to prevent Windows from automatically installing drivers and then do a clean install of the Nvidia ones. I'm worried that there might be an actual hardware problem, though as of yet I don't really have any way to test that.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that there are green horizontal line video artifacts on my bios splash screen. They've been there only since this problem began.