Nvidia drivers BSOD

Hi everyone. I'm having quite an annoying issue here I thought someone may be able to help with. I own a Gateway P-6860FX laptop and I recently purchased Battlefield Bad Company 2. Upon running the game, I began noticing large black blotches, sometimes multicolor blotches, skewing the field of view. I hoped this wasn't a hardware requirement issue, but it seems my GPU is sufficient for running the game, so I looked for updated drivers for the NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTS and found the 258.96 (http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-258.96...) driver update. (This was updated from the 7.15.11.6746 drivers on the Gateway website)

Cutting to the chase, I installed these drivers, and now I get random hangs where the mouse will stop moving for no reason, and this is only when I am not using a graphics intensive program. Not once has it cut out on me in the middle of Battlefield or any other game, but when doing random small tasks like using MS Word, the mouse will stop moving, the hard drive light will stop blinking, and the computer goes completely unresponsive. It seems like the issue is a BSOD without the BS, because when starting the computer back up after windows loads, I get a message that there is a driver conflict of some sort that pertains to the graphics card drivers. I actually reverted to the old drivers for a few minutes to see if the computer would freeze randomly and I got the results I had expected. No freezes or hangs at all. Battlefield however, was back to the old blotchy display. Does anyone have any idea whats going on here? I can collect more information like memory dumps from the "BSOD" if necessary. I am running the standard P-6860FX system with Windows Vista 64bit. Basically I don't want to have to reinstall drivers every time I play Battlefield. Thanks for taking the time to read, and even more thanks in advance for responding.