SOLVED: I bought a (long needed) Antec 550W PSU, and brought the water cool unit out of the woodwork. CPU temp is way down, and no more overheating video card. All issues have disappeared. Thanks for all help and suggestions. seems that vista is just a bit more demanding than xp, so my hardware was working overtime. watercooling my cpu, video card, and hd was just the medicine it needed. I was barking up the wrong tree with driver issues.