Can older Drivers give me better performance?

it depends, but yes. driver overhead can really be an issue.

for example I found my 6600LE to give better performance on an older driver set.

Yes, sometimes you will get better performance with older drivers, especially with the drivers that came on a CD with your video card:

If your card was modified by the manufacturer and does not follow the reference design to the letter it may work slower with newer drivers. Moreover, it may have special features not available in the reference design. In this case using the latest nVidia reference drivers may render such features unusable.

Finally, you do not need to purchase a driver cleaner. There are plenty of free ones available at www.guru3D.com , for example.

Howdy,

Thanks for the replys. I went ahead and tried it and my fps dropped like crazy. BUT after cleaning out the old ones and reinstalling the new ones, by fps went up 20 fps then they were before I started, LOL. So the clean up was still a good thing.

FX-55
XFX 6800GT x 2 SLI

CS:S stress test (1600x1200, 4AA, 16AF)
-- Latest drivers before I began messing with it
101 fps

-- Cleaned up old drivers and installed 84.21
62 fps

-- Cleaned up 84.21 and reinstalled latest drivers again
122 fps

Too funny! On a side note I did spend a LOT of time screwing around with the original set up so its only fitting for me to know to leave it alone, LOL

Thanks again,
Doody