The latest nvidia drivers for vista has made my pc extremely unstable during
gaming. i had beta driver 16371 which was very good for playing old game
like Mafia, and HL2 ep3 ran good, and World in Conflict, and the Crisis
demo. I upgraded to 16902 and 16904 and now my games are unplayable,
constant crashed, memory dumps with BSODs. I restored to wehn i had the
16371 driver, but still crashes. i ran a reg cleaner and defraged and what
not, tried the games with AA on and off, lower and higher resolutions, etc
any ideas anyone? maybe any tips on proper driver installs?
any help is appreciated

Let me start off by saying: you're definitely not the only one.

I have been experiencing these constant BSoDs since building this machine
and installing Vista. Just from looking around I haven't been able to make
any guesses as to what might be causing the issue; Windows Problem Reports
and Solutions says the issue is nVidia related, but it might also be an issue
with Vista itself. Some people theorize that it is a problem with Creative
X-Fi drivers. So far, I've only been able to determine that SLI is not the
cause of the problem.

What are your specs? Perhaps it's an issue with 64 bit drivers, or the way
Windows' 32-bit subsystem (can't remember the name right now) passes
information to the video cards? Here's my setup:

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit (OEM)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.67GHz
Zalman CNPS-9700NT CPU cooler
4 GB Mushkin XP2-6400 DDR2-800 (2 x 2GB) RAM
BFG 8800 GTX OC2 x 2 (SLI)
Creative X-Fi Elite Pro
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 W
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB
LG DVD 16x R/W