Latest NVIDIA drivers (296.10) installation fails.

To All Who Kindly Replied;

I FIXED IT!!!! It wasn't easy, but I finally got everything worthwhile installed......

First, I had to totally remove the old 275.33 package and stripped my display driver to bare bones - basic VGA only.

Then I opened Device Manager, looked for the display adapter (had a little yellow "!"), clicked on update driver, pointed Windows to C:\NVIDIA\DisplayDriver\yada-yada-yada\Display.Driver and Windows did the rest.

Did a restart, opened the setup.exe in the above mentioned folder and voila! The 296.10 drivers were installed and working fine.

After that, I did a separate install of PhysX & 3DVision (if you try to do a custom install with just those 2, it screws everything up all over again) - and I have everything but the 3DVision Controller Driver and the HD Audio Driver; neither of which I use anyway.

I may have taken a couple of extra steps here and there, but now I know what to do if it ever happens again. I imagine that if I did an express install, I'd have it all in place - but now that I have it working, I'd rather not chance messing it up again!

Once again, many thanks to all of you who had the courtesy to pitch in and offer your help and advice!!!!

I found an easy solution which should be quite universal, even if you dont have Win2000, this should help you if the CPL doesnt install at all. I attempted installing the drivers labled 190.62_desktop_winxp_32bit_english_whql (i chose an 'old' version because i hoped for it to be compatible) it found i had W2K and installed compatible drivers, but didnt install the CPL. running the msi by itself gave the error "Setup failed to read the required Display Driver to be used with this package. Setup will not continue" when i ran the MSI file.... could have been W2K or it saw the X700 i have in the 1x slot beside the Nvidia card. some people suggested completely uninstalling and reinstalling (i upgraded from NVIDIA94.24_forceware_winxp_english_whql which is the one recommended for W2K, but it crashes if i move playing video between screens - except if i do it slow). after this it then asked for two files at reboot, one being the CPL (good). trying to hack the MSI with orca didnt work (orca is probably too old i guess) so after some searching i decided to extract the MSI.

first, run the MSI file that you see in the install DIR, and copy the MSI file from the "local settings\temp" directory (look for random characters like {925BE668-2...) to another, and exit the current setup. then do the following to extract it:

C:\Documents and Settings\User1>msiexec /a "C:\Documents and Settings\User
1\Local Settings\Temp\NVIDIA Control Panel.msi" /qb TARGETDIR="C:\Documents and Settings\User1\My Documents\New Folder"

in "new folder" i find: Nvidia control panel.msi (2.56Mb), and System32 and Windows folders.

copy the files from the folders into the respective locations (system32 and help), and viola! i get the cpl in the monitor advanced properties.

it still does crash the player if i move it very fast but i dont do that often.

edit: i can't use dual view - i am positive that W2k dislikes the dualview 'display adapter', maybe a newer version would help.... in the meantime Horizontal span will do. the error is "The Currently selected graphics driver can not be used. It was written for a previous version of Windows, and is no longer compatible with this version of Windows..." referring to the Nvidia Dualview adapter.

edit2: source is http://superuser.com/questions/30767...om-msi-package and also states that you will need an elevated command prompt (run as admin), in newer windows versions.

Charlie.