Problems after installing my Geforce 9500GT

 

WTF? Doesn't that computer have a NVidia GeForce 7900GS in its stock configuration? Your 9500GT may actually provide slightly lower performance. Sure you can argue the 9500GT has DX10 , but it doesn't have the performance to run it at anything above a slide show. I wouldn't use DX10 on anything less than a Radeon 4650. O.k. now that I'm done complaining.

Did you make sure to remove your old nVidia drivers? The order in which you should have installed the card is to first remove your old drivers, then install the new card, and finally install the new drivers. If you just tried upgrading your drivers then you could have all sorts of messed up settings, especially on good ol windows Vista. Try uninstalling your drivers, and also boot up in safe mode and go to the device manager to make sure that it doesn't say 9500GT under display adapters. If it does uninstall it. After you do all that reboot your computer, don't let windows automatically install the driver, and then run the setup program for the nVidia drivers you downloaded.

If you do all that and it still gives you guff you may need to download drive cleaner or something.

Yeah I did all that.

My system actually came with a crap ATI card when I bought it. (Not saying all ATI are. But the one I had was.) I will try the drive cleaner. I actually got it to finally run a clean up and a defrag going right now. So it seems to be improving.

I think the base card was the 7300 Lousy Edition or the ATI X1300, can't remember but I still have one of each in a drawer somewhere.
Always use DriverCleaner or Sweeper, whatever your preference.