New ATI 9600XT commonly crashes

I made the purchase of a 9600XT in the last few days to hold meo over until PCI express comes out because I needed a DVI connector that my GF3 lacked.
I was originally strongly opposed to getting an ATI due to my ATI mobile having a habit of blue screening often enough to be annoying. I was assured the ATI reference drivers worked much better than the mobile ones... Well; I must have a touch with making ATI cards fail.
I CONSTANTLY get 'We have had to restart your GPU' errors asking to send an email to ATI -- this is in games (or rather; Final Fantasy XI, the only game I play) or just on the desktop. Heck; I got one half way through writing this message.
I've used both the latest reference drivers off ATI.com for WinXP as well as the OmegaDrivers. Both do the same thing - I'm lucky to get 10 minutes without one of these errors.

Any ideas?

Well, it's not just FFXI if it happened when you were posting....

If you still have the omega drivers, try running Driver Cleaner, and reinstalling the drivers. Sometimes your registry gets screwed up after too many hardware/software changes.

Yeah, there might be some problems caused by the old GF3 drivers.

I did the driver cleaner; same problem.
With ATI's new "Overdrive" feature (which is disabled) I'm rather sure there is a temperature sensor in the Radeon. If this is true is there a way I can check it's temperature? The card seems to work for a period of time but after being stressed be extremely unstable for a period of time.
I've had the side of my case off to give the card more airflow since I installed it so I certainly hope this isn't the problem.

Disable "VPU Recover"..it creates more problems than it solves!

Tried that too. That just changes it from a soft crash to a hard crash.

hmm.. Maybe you just got a bad card :X .

did you contact them about this?

Before you go returning everything, I'd try a full system reinstall. Periodically it's a good idea to reformat everything and reinstall Windows. Especially if you've upgraded hardware much. I do it every few months so everything runs smooth. Windows has a way of f****** itself up.

This install has basically been the following:
Install WinXP
Install patches and drivers
Install Final Fantasy XI
Install MS Dev Studio
(insert running of FFXI and MSDS multiple times)
uninstall GF3 drivers/GF3
Install 9600XT

So the only hardware change to the system has been the GF3 swap for the 9600... I'm REALLY REALLY REALLY hoping to avoid a reformat because FFXI off a fresh install is 4 or 5 CDs (about 1/2 an hour of installing) followed by HOURS of patching online.

iv got a 9600 xt...it runs perfectly

Wouldn't surprise me; I think it'd be pronounced if everyone in the world was having problems with this card