ATI 5970 - Black Screen, Hard Reset: Same but different

Hi,

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I seem to have the same problem as many others where the screen just goes black and you have to hard reset. But mine seems to be a bit different - Once I get to that point and I get the hard reset out of the way, it will run for the rest of the day without any issues at all. At the moment, I can leave it idle and it will go black eventually or I can just invoke a game or Furmark (that will do it inside 30 seconds) and once I hard reset, it's good !

Any ideas why ? Is there a flag that gets set somewhere once it goes black that I can just set from the beginning so I don't have to go through this whole routine ?? A hardware issue just seems unlikely otherwise it would be failing several times during the course of the day, no ? Obviously something changes post hard reset for it not to happen again. I just can't figure out what.

Any suggestions appreciated.

Edit: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, latest ATI drivers