Driver problems causing instability and screen flashing/cp..

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia (More info?)

Help. After I updated my Geforce 5200 drivers with latest NVIDIA ones, as
well as moving from Direct X 9.0b to 9.0c, I keep getting either problems
where on opening simple applications (IE6, OE6), the monitor
blinks black occasionally. Often, I'll get this happening regularly every
10-15 seconds, and from Task Manager can see that coinciding with a 100% CPU
spike.

I've also getting desktop corruption intermittently. I've tried going
initially back on NVIDIA drivers, firstly going from 61.77 to 61.36 and now
to 52.16, but it's worse if anything on the latter.

I'm further getting a lot of "Windows has receovered from a serious error"
messages. On submitting to MS they appear to indicate a problem with the
Nvidia drivers, but having replaced, does this point to a hardware fault
now?

I'm running XP, using an ECS/Elite L7VTA Motherboard. I've swapped my
memory out, and am now using 2x512mb DDR333 sticks. System temperature
running around 60 degrees - it's always been about that.