Crashing/BSOD issues, probably driver related...

Hello, Windows 7 Forums. I wish I could be making a first post on happy terms. Sigh. But in searching for possible solutions to my problem, I found this forum and have learned some pretty nifty things, so I'm hoping I might find at least a little help here.

I'm not a TOTAL technophile, so please bear with me. But. About a year ago, I purchased a brand spanking new Gateway computer. Intel core 2 Quad processor, 6 GB DDR3 Ram, 640 GB HD, Windows 7 (obviously), nVidia GeForce GT 220. That's off the top of my head. As soon as I get the chance I'll post a full report from CPU-Z, I've got my baby turned off at the moment and having a sleep.

If it helps at all to know, I'm not a hardcore PC gamer or anything. There's a couple games I have on the system (and I mean "a couple", my free harddrive space is like... in the several hundred gigs yet!) and they fall WELL beneath the system reqs. But that may be completely irrelevant.

SO. The first problem I had was many months ago, when I brought my baby home and got her set up, I did the whole driver/software thing, and when I got to the GeForce driver, I had some trouble. All of a sudden the screen was PACKED full of garbage, not just a few, but MILLIONS of cluttered pixels flashing all over the place, making everything completely unviewable.

I very quickly rolled back the driver to the next most recent version, and everything was fine. Months go by, no problems whatsoever. Fast forward to just this past weekend. I'm good about staying on top of Windows Updates, always being sure to AVOID updating the nvidia driver. So, I went through a resent update, computer rebooted, everything's A-OK, I go to watch a movie, and all of a sudden... well, the computer hung for a couple seconds, went black, and I got a BSOD.

Not just a regular BSOD. One of those "Your computer is shutting down because of a system failure to prevent damage" BSODs. Now, I FREAKED. The last time I saw this was when I gave up my old XP computer, when I turned it on one day to see EXACTLY THAT telling me, basically, "Your harddrive's junked. Have fun."

Except I managed to catch something on this BSOD before the computer rebooted: "nVidia graphic driver". So, I manage to calm down, figure, okay, it's been a few months, let's take on that driver and see what happens."

I do. Immediate insane garbage again, just like the last time. That's... incredibly annoying. I reset a bunch of settings, nothing. Try and tweak a few things, nothing. So, frustrated and thinking maybe the solution is SO SIMPLE, I hit Google and start looking around. I found this one obscure little piece of advice, about changing some of the display settings, and it worked. I was like, HOT DAMN. Hurray!

But then IT started. Every twenty seconds, even if I was doing nothing at all, the computer would freeze, and I'd get that little message: "Display driver stopped working and has recovered." Then the BSODs started again.

Short of hurling my new, wonderful computer out the window, I cleared EVERY trace of the nvidia drivers off my system, and basically did this until I found a version of the drivers that would stop the pixel garbage, and stop the frustrating popups.

Except now, it just HANGS. When I try to do ANYTHING. I load up a video, the whole system just.... hangs. I open a photo album? Hangs. Just freaking browing the net? Hangs.

I asked another forum on which I'm a member and told, "it's a memory problem" and had someone else say "viruses lol format the system." Except I'm insanely careful about viruses and such, and I am ALWAYS on top of it, and well, I haven't been able to run memtest yet, but I did run the onboardy memory diagnostic and came up fine. I defragged, I've yet to do a bit of cleaning in the registry. Other than that, I'm practically at my wits.

I'd like to hear that there's some hope for me (and my computer) yet, but any, and ALL, thoughts and input are extremely appreciated at this point. I apologize for getting long and ranty, but, it's what I do.

If there's any other info I can provide, I'll provide it ASAP. And many thanks in advance.

Well, I did a few good scans, swept a whole bunch of garbage out of the registry, even managed to get the dump files with no problem, with my display settings set to "Classic Windows". I thought, hmm, maybe that's all it needed was a bit of cleaning.

So, I change back to a more...appealing, modern Windows 7 look. I fire up a video player, because my TV's recently died and I'd love to catch a movie.

HANGS. AGAIN. No messages, no warning, no nothing. Just immediate hanging, and I have to pull to plug to shut the machine off. It proceeds to do the exact same thing. Twice in a row. On the START UP SCREEN.

Why. WHY. Augh. Here's the dump files and etc.