Vista - GeForce 8800GT ? failure

Today my screen saver locked up and I had to shut down via the on/off button.
On reboot the screen was covered in rows of " l "s and then a blue screen that was only on for a moment but said something about "graphics driver and timeout". I can get into Safe Mode. The drivers are up to date. Now I don't know what to do next. Help!

Does it boot into Windows normally, or is the problem still there?

No - it will not boot into windows directly. I get a blue screen - shutdown - then the options of safe mode etc.

boot into safemode goto control panel uninstall your current drivers and reboot let us know what happens

Archie I did as you suggested and it booted me into Windows in vga. It then seemed to try to update drivers. Then it shut down again and now it is trying to do a startup repair.

mmmmmm how odd , so it crashed again after booting into windows?

heres a description of what happens when your graphics card "times out",....

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device...m_timeout.mspx

now normally WDDM would kick in and you would get the "graphics driver failed but was sucessfully recovered" message in windows

However when WDDM cant recover the GPU or driver state it "times out" and bluscreens giving you the message you got

this is 99% of the time due to a driver failiure but on rare occations could be a GPU fault , we need to get your system up and running again to run some tests and see whats what , as its booting into safemode im confident your GPU is ok

what drivers are you running at the moment? (version) and did you download them from the official NVidia , ATI site? whats GPU do you have?

also it might be a good idea to take the side off your case check all is ok , everything plugged in correctly and ll dust free

The card is NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT
Driver is v 8.16.11.9170 dated 27/09/2009 I got it from the Nvidia website. (It did say it was for the GTX295 now that I remember. Is that maybe the wrong driver?
I took the card out and reseated it and the cables looked OK. There was no dust.
I noticed when I reinstalled the driver it said something about "stereo mode" (or something like that) not being installed in the install dialogue.

no mate if it was the wrong driver it wouldnt install , you cant install the wrong one it wont let you

stereo mode is just for 3d gaming dont worry about it edit....by 3d gaming i mean the 3d glasses type , proper 3D not 3d gaming.........if that makes any sense ??

hows it going now? wahts the situation?

Not too much further forward. I now discover my card is Nvidia Geforce 8800GT (idiot) and had been downloading the driver for GTX 295. However when I get the right driver from the website or my Dell disks it wont install. Says there is no driver software to update or something of that sort. So I'm left in Safe Mode... Is it possible the card has failed and is there any way of testing this short of buying a new card?
I appreciate you help.
John

Further to that, since I uninstalled the drivers, I'm now in windows (not safe mode) low graphics. System says it has updated the drivers and needs a reboot but when I did that before I was back to where I started!!!