Vista - Driver size

I instaled 182.08 and I noticed that in Programs and Features it shoews the nvidia drivers being 3.46GB. Is this a display bug? Should I uninstall and reinstall these drivers? The driver file is only 100MB.

Drivers themselves are mostly tiny, generally 1MB or less.

There's a trend towards "Full Featured Packages" from driver manufacturers that deploy 17 different apps They Thought You Would Like To Have, such as their exclusive systray volume control knob, in case you were dissatisfied with the other one, plus that annoying popup splash at boot time, plus the random rundll32 errors which they didn't intend but they hope you're enjoying anyway... oh, and maybe the driver itself, as an afterthought.

Still, 3.46GB sounds huge, even by those standards. Are you sure it's not a folder that contains many different versions of their Full Feature package?

Here is a screen shot from "Programs and Features" of the installed NVIDIA drivers.

Each one of the entries in that list maps to a key underneath the following path in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

The InstallSource and/or InstallLocation values point to the folders whose size is being reported, at a guess. If you check the locations of those folders in your case using regedit, you'll most likely find something like "c:\program files\NVIDIA...". If you then right-click that folder in Explorer and choose properties, it should display the size.

Ok odly enough it points to C:\Windows\system32
This folder is about 3.5GB.

Either the NVIDIA driver installation routine wrongly made that path point to \windows\system32, or something damaged the (correct) registry value which was there previously. In itself, this problem is only cosmetic, for now, but if you've run registry "cleaners" that could lead to bigger issues too.

The drivers that you have will be a bundled pack. Generally the drivers that are available for the download and the one installed on the computer, the size does vary. This is because the pack contains bundle of video drivers. Your computer installs only the required driver. ....... All is well if your video card is working normally.