Vista - Nvidia's latest drivers (191.00)

Hello community,

I"m having an issue with my display drivers and vista. I have Vista Business x64 with the NVidia FX3800 running dual Acer x223w's. Everything was fine until SP2 was installed a while back. Now, any time the systems starts, is rebooted, goes to sleep, or is locked the secondary monitor is no longer detected by Windows. I've discovered that by trying a combination of turning the monitor on and off, or unplugging and replugging it I can eventually get it to be detected again. But as you can imagine this is very frustrating and annoying to do every time. Additionally, the sequence of what works getting the monitor detected again seems to be different every time. I've tried a few different drivers from NVidia and all seem to have this problem. I'm currently running the latest drivers (191.00). Is this a known bug? Is it being addressed by either nvidia or MS?

any idea on how to solve this?

Thanks for the time.

I'm kind of guessing on your video card but they just had driver updates. I'm pretty sure for all the cards / OS's version should be 191.07 Release Date: 2009.10.05 hop that works for you that sounds annoying

Good thought on the new drivers. But I justed checked Nvidia's website and it lists the 191.00 drivers as the latest drivers (released 2009.09.22)

do you remember where you saw the newer drivers? are they beta drivers?

Thanks

A few updates. I've tried a couple of other things. It seems as though the DVI port works fine, but both the Display Ports are having an issue (the fx3800 has two display port and one dvi connector, but only two of the three can be active at a time) If a monitor is plugged into the DVI port, it works fine. But nothing is coming out of the Display port.

I tried updating the driver from Hardware manager to see if there were more current drivers available. Windows claimed to have found more current drivers, but it actually installed version 182.67 (released 5.12.2009), which is just downright strange. Why would it detect older drivers as more current? This of course didn't fix the problem, so I tried searching for updated drivers again via Hardware manager and it didn't find the 191.00 driver. So I tried rolling back the driver again via hardware manager and it "rolled back" to 191.00. Non of this actually fixed my problem. But during this process I was getting very strange errors like windows can't read/write to certain directories on the c drive. I was also taken to a temporary desktop and got a notice saying my desktop couldn't be loaded properly and any changes made wouldn't be saved. It also looked like Win2000 when the desktop came up, not the Vista Aero theme I have it set to. This is all very worrisome to me.

To add a fun wrinkle to the story, I had decided I needed to get some work done, so I just ignored the issue and started doing my work with only the one working monitor. Suddenly, the second monitor came alive. I have to admit, I am at a complete loss. I've decided to order a new DVI to Displayport adapter to see if that is the problem, but I'm not really holding my breath. My next step might be to uninstall the nvidia drivers completely, try and manually clean out the registry (I seem to remember nvidia drivers are notoriously bad at cleaning up after themselves) and reinstalling the whole thing.

This is on a production machine and I'm in school, so I don't have a lot of time to deal with this. any ideas anyone has would be greatly appreciated.

thanks again community.

Latest drivers here. Make sure you grab 64-bit.
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
Also see if you can flash your bios.
Check device drivers for any errors.
from elevated command prompt run c: sfc /scannow

Yep, that's where I found the most current drivers. (linked to in my second post). I was wondering about those 191.07 drivers that blue75 mentioned. I don't seem to see them anywhere.

will try that other stuff too.

Thanks.

I found them on the the Nvidia site but you can find them here also.No they weren't beta but maybe your card isn't included in their update.I knew I should have checked the board before I sacked out Thats really the only site I trust for freeware nowadays.I should have left you a link sorry about that I'll check back later.
Download NVIDIA Forceware - FileHippo.com

so sfc /scannow didn't find anything

I looked in Event Viewer for errors. Didn't see anything that looked related to my problem. Although I'm admittedly no expert at navigating and interpreting anything logged in Event Viewer.

I'd really rather not flash the bios at this point in time.

Getting other random issues, like chrome keeps crashing. Windows occasionally won't shut down properly, and when it starts up again I get the screen saying Windows didn't shut down properly and asking me if I want to boot into safe mode or regular windows.

any other thoughts?

thanks again community

Well, I used the new DVI to Displayport cable and (knocking very loudly on wood) the system appears to be functioning normally. I suppose it was just a strange coincidence that this all occurred immediately after the SP2 installation.