Geforce 9600 Fail

Hello,

Right off the bat, here are my specs:

Windows XP Professional
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Processors
16GB RAM
Asus M5A97 Motherboard
Sparkle Geforce 9600 GT video card
750WT Power Supply

Issues started the other day - I assume what happened is that my video card crashed somehow because I was trying to play Dota 2 and it kept freezing and on the 3rd restart my computer completely crashed. I wiped it, installed Windows XP instead of 7 since it's a little more stable, and now I can at least run my computer (can't play games) but the graphics card isn't working. Sometimes it will recognize what card it is and install the graphics automatically and other time it just says there's a VGA controller/3D graphics card. Whenever I've tried to install the drivers I restart and after the Windows Loading screen thing the screen goes all blocky and I have to restart, at which time it will tell me that Windows failed to restart and I can choose a boot option.

I have tried resetting the card, installing beta drivers, changing my bios (There wasn't much I could change in there, I don't have an option for graphics priority beyond PCI/PEG vs PEG/PCI). It's definitely the drivers because every time I install them and it doesn't work I'll go into safe mode, uninstall them, restart and everything will load fine (minus the card of course). Now, though, I can't even use the Nvidia installer to get the graphics on - it just tells me that the installer failed, even when I choose clean installation. I've also tried going in and manually deleting all the nvidia files.

I do not have onboard graphics so I can't plug my monitor directly into the motherboard and try that  

Sorry for the wall of text! Just trying to be thorough! Thanks!!!!