GTX 560 Ti - Persistent problem!

Some days ago i upgraded to a GTX 560 Ti from my old 9800GTX+ and expected beautiful things and at last a first hand glimpse into three-letter acronyms and contemporary game graphics. I was however brought down to earth by a tedious pause as I was trying to set it up via the RMB action menu on the desktop; the menu was delayed by a good 30 seconds only to reveal the total absence of NVidia Control Panel (!)..

Latest drivers installed flawlessly and nothing seems to be wrong anywhere, except that I cannot access nVCP no matter what I do. Needless to say I've tried everything except getting physical on it - I systematically went through an array of drivers first, toggled loads of various services and processes, changed startups, logged on to another user... nada. This leads me to believe that my MSI MB might not have what it takes to accomodate a 560Ti? Perhaps it's a simple tweak I've done in W7 that's not compatible with the GTX-range? Why this annoying problem while all drivers are fully functional? I'm totally lost here ..no such thing with the 9800 (or any other card I've had for that matter).

Fyi my mainboard is unfortunately still a MSI P7N SLI (MS-7380), the CPU a Core 2 Q6600 and the new GFX-card a ZOTAC GeForce GTX 560Ti 1GB.

I hope someone here have experienced this before or might have an idea as to what this can relate to - software? hardware? my resigned head missing out on some obvious fix? .. The fact remains that I'm still waiting 30+ sec each time i need the desktop screen menu and the NVidia Control Panel is just a faint memory from good old days...

Any suggestions are much appreciated, I give up.

\R