Surf...like so many other people...the problem does not appear in XP and if it does usually a clean driver install fixes the problem.
Just to update people on my 163.11 beta adventure...so while the drivers are not giving me the NVL error I am getting BSODs. Everytime I login back in after the reboot the error recovery thing pops up saying the sidebar died basically – BSOD is sporadic at best as its happened twice since Friday 6pm. I managed to catch the flu on the hottest day of the year here in London...so the thought of disabling the sidebar and seeing if it still crashed did not even occur to me. I think this flu is killing my last braincell of it mounting its attack. Oh the way it was done...
1. Drivers 158.24 were installed and stable thus far. Norton360 was the FW/AV and the latest updates installed. Defender was running. UAC was turned off
2. Disabled the AV and removed the 'only remove display drivers' in the control panel and rebooted manually
3. Clicked the 163.11 beta exe which did the usual extract and install. Threw up the usual unidentified driver error which I accepted and completed the install. Clicked ‘NO’ to reboot now as I wanted to do some things before restarting
4. Opened a command window in the C:\Nvidia\winall\163.11 folder and entered
5. EXPAND.EXE nvlddmkm.sy_ nvlddmkm.sys
6. This gave me a NVL file around 7MB in size
7. I then copied this file into the following locations:
\system32
\drivers\
8. Did a search on the system32 folder to see if I could find any other NVL files and managed to see that there was one in the NV4_disp folder in the ‘FileRepository’ folder so I tired copying it into there. For some reason it would not allow me and gave me the ‘permission denied’ error.
9. I used the takeown and calcs commands to give myself permissions the all the files in the NV4_disp folder via *.* wildcards
10. I was then able to copy and replace the NVL file.
11. I was effectively manually copying across the NVL file everywhere that already had an instance of the file
12. I then restarted the PC after allowing the changes defender has noticed
13. Played LostPlanet and Halo2 for 10 mins each before running 3Dmark06 in a loop all tests for few hours while I went shopping (yep…clothes…got this awesome diamond blue tank top which is like soooo awesome). No NVL error…then left only uTorrent running and left the PC alone…went to the cinema to watch Transformers…which is like uber-awesomely-kool…
14. When I came back the PC has had crashed and as waiting at the login screen. Vista said the sidebar had crashed.
15. I am going switch off the sidebar and see if the BSOD still occurs. There is no mention of the NVL error anywhere in the logs
16. If the sidebar is not the cause of the BSOD then the power manage features of vista is causing it in my eyes and then will look into that
17. I usually have everything maxed out in the power tab and disabled poweMgt for the NICs and USB devices if the tab appears…might have to regedit and hardcode it if it still occurs
So that’s what I did. Notice that I did not boot into safe mode at any time or use driver cleaner. Chipset drivers where 15.00.
I tried to make the NVL error come up by opening 100 explorer windows and running bsplayer, mpc, WMP11 and GOM all playing different files (HD 1920x1080p60fps *.tp files) while CSS was running in a window (I was spectator on a server) and switched continuously between basic theme and aero with all this happening while the AV, spybot were running a scan and a defrag running and 2 instance across 4 cores of ortho were running…yep…totally hammering the PC and HDDs…not once did the NVL error come up. Usually opening a few windows and flipping between aero/basic theme was enough to bring NVLs up but not this time.
Few things to bear in-mind. I was going from what I consider stable drivers, so if u don’t even have those then u might make things even worse.
Just to re-cap…PC was the one in the sig, one ram dimm 2GB with rivetuner setting the fan to 100% for the 88ultra
Let me know what happens on ur PC and what you did and if the NVL error does not appear let ur PC run for a few days before telling me
Update: Since Sunday night 9pm till now the PC has been rock stable since disabling sidebar with all my lovely (really gonna miss the notes one and the CPU usuage one ooo...totally loved the recent documents one as well) widgets or gadgets. Bearing in mind I have been stressing the PC left right and center...think its good enough for me so far. Peeps...think we might have a botched solution that allows us to use the latest drivers :-|
My advice would be to get the the .24 or there abouts drivers installed and stable. Only downer is that I am still stuck with one stick of ram instead of 2 (£400 pounds worth of ram is pretty much useless to me right now)...not gonna cry about it though as still have 2GB of RAM which is shweet...if it was 1GB then I'd be miffed. OK so get some stable drivers installed and give my method a go. Its working for me so far and dont forget to disable sidebar...I have aero enabled. Also...my UAC is turned off...everyone has there preference but I personally dont want to enable UAC because it might screw up my shotgun-but-stable install of the drivers.
Its really amazing...over 1000 visits and very few people are letting me know there progress...if ur still having problems post up specs' etc and we can see what we can do together
I will update the thread if anything new happens until then I will most likely only respond to post in the thread...yep...being lazy as I fixed mine...