I was thinking it was a driver issue as well, however I "sort of" have gotten used to the nvidia control panel being on.. Is there any sort of actual fix for this aside from turning it off? Besides I'm concerned that my monitor/GPU's would not display properly or be in Sli with it off.
Also, running that software on bare defaults will cause the problem as well. Anytime I click on the nvidia control panel in the systray it also causes the monitor to blink.