Quote from the nVidia FAQ - Driver Installation: "...simply run the drivers you have downloaded by double-clicking on the file. The drivers will automatically update your current drivers and make the necessary changes to your system."
Well forget about that. I installed the 43.45 drivers on top of 30.82 and after the reboot the 30.82 ones were still there. No sign of 43.45!
Now I know it is common practice to uninstall your old drivers first, but when the FAQ says you don't need to...
So I uninstalled 30.82 going through the 640 x 480, reshuffled icons, Mondrian painted desktop routine
and after that 43.45 installed fine. Next another hour of desktop redesign, reconfiguring the color correction, making blackice understand that the driver files are updated and not infected by a virus.
Then applying coolbits to the registry to get advanced tweaking back and finally placing the checkmark for Texture Sharpening. On to GA, but oddly enough it suddenly runs in 1280 x 960 instead of the 1280 x 1024 that it was set to before
The same with MA2 and MAT. I wonder if that's a bug. Well, back to GA at 1280 x 1024 and finding to my disappointment that it looks just slightly better with loss of 5 fps.
And now while checking some other screensavers I am running into a BSOD which I barely managed to escape for now. Signing off for a reboot, to be continued...