Video OK when booting, then dies

Fellow geeks,

My Pentium 3 Win 98 PC (which I use for games) has an Nvidia MX 4000 card. It worked fine for a few months, but yesterday I booted up - everuthing looked normal (the Intel mobo screen, the video ID, and even the Win98 logo), but once it gets to the dsktop, WHAM, the display is totally scrambled. I installed another old video card and now its OK, so I guess my nvidia driver got corrupted. Why would that happen all of the sudden? Theres no new TSRs loading, no new hardware was installed, nothing different.

I'll reinstall the driver and run some diagnostics, but I was curious to see if this problem is common or if anyone knows why my driver would crap out only once the desktop is reached during bootup. I scanned for viuses (I always update my definitions).

Thanks in advance

DCO

 

If you installed another video card and it's now okay, then it would be the old video card and not the driver.

Did you install another card and used the existing driver, or a new card and a new driver?

Your post is ambiguous.

 

Insomniac,
Since the boot up screens (the Intel mobo screen and the video Ram count) appeared OK, I assumed the card itself was working. Its only once Windows started that the video became scrambled. Thats why I believed it to be the driver. This is a great learning opportunity for future display problems (I'm an A+ tech myself). Its indeed strange.
Anyway, I replaced the card with another one and it was fine. But then I replaced the original card and reinstalled the driver, then quickly upgraded to the newest driver found online. Its fine now.
I scanned for viruses and found none, but even with the latest definitions you never know if you have a virus that came out in the past day or two. I've been having problems with fatal exceptions while playing video games (very display intensive) and I noticed that when I turn off my anti virus, the errors don't appear. I also turn off all but essential TSRs. Apparently this video card (nVidia GeForce MX 4000) is touchy when any other app is running in the background. Maybe that problem was due to a conflict with another software program.
Thanks for your reply. These forums are great for practicing troubleshooting skills. Even though its now fixed, I'd still like to learn what happened for future reference.
DCO