Games crash immdiately - ATI 4870 - Windows 7 x64

Tried everything including updated drivers, reinstall of win 7 and nodda, high end games cause memory dump and restart. Finally did Heritics solution and unseated the graphics card, statred win7 (no screen without card of course) waited for full reboot, again shut down win7 and reseated the card, THIS WORKED !! Checked and aparrently win7 had installed a year old version of driver ver. 8.6. Games worked with no problem but without the better rendering of the new drivers. However, now I can not upgrade catalyst or driver (tried several ways i.e. unistalled all ati and tried to update through device maneger ect. and although the installer appears to complete on reboot win7 reinstalled the old 8.6 driver !?. With so many posts you would think that by now ati would have a solution other than the standared fixes that don't work !@x!. Spent way to much time on this, any one have any resolutions?