Video card problems.....need help!

First off, the problems started a couple days before leaving home for a couple of weeks, so I am not near my computer and I forgot the info I wrote down before I left, so bare with me.

Last week I replaced my out dated GeForce fx 64mb card with a ATI AIW 9800 Pro 128mb card. All was great, the kids (and me of course) were able to play all the new games Santa brought EQ2, HL2 and a few others. A couple days later I went on and the game was running slow. So I checked my performance, CPU usage was at 100%. I shut down the game and the CPU usage was jumping between 75% and 95% with no processes running, system Idle was at 98. Right away I thought spyware or a virus, because this happened before. After a day of cleaning using multiple spyware/adware programs and mcafee virus scan plus other online scanners, I was satisfied that The computer was clean. But the problem was still there.

Started thinking maybe it was the new card, so I uninstalled the ATI driver and other ATI components and the CPU usage was the same. I reinstalled the ATI driver. Did some checking on the forums for some answers. After awhile I decided to try a system restore, problem was still there. So I shut the computer down for awhile. When I turned it back on I had a blue screen error, 'atixxx.exe (can't remember actual name) causing a system error and windows will not start for safety reasons, ati driver stuck in infinit loop, driver not installed correctly or corrupted'. Something like that. I could only start in safe mode, so I tried uninstalling and reinstalling again, still error screen. Shut the computer down for awhile. When I started it up again my monitor wouldn't come out of sleep mode. At that point I gave up and put the Nvidia card back in, loaded the driver and it is back to normal.

I know now that there are some things I should have done. Like updating my chipset for the agp, should have use a driver cleaner and downloading updated drivers instead of using the one out of the box. It worked fine for two days straight and I don't know how much of this snowballed because I didn't use a driver cleaner.
So I came to the pros for some more ideas.

dell
P4 3gb
intel chipset
512ram
120hd

 

LOL wheres the edit button
Forgot to add that I am running Windows XP

 

Anybody have any ideas?

 

what process did you use to get rid of your Nvidia drivers? this sounds purely like a driver problem to me.

Uninstall your vid card drivers through Add/Remove programs if you can get into windows. If you can, upon restaring, boot to safe mode.

if you cant, still boot to safe mode with networking.

download and install Driver Cleaner 3. in safe mode, run Driver cleaner, choosing nvidia graphics, and after that cleans, do the ATI graphics as well.

then, boot back into normal windows and install the ATi drivers.

driver cleaner can be found here http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3214.html

good luck!