Vista 64 bit won't SLI with 17x.xx drivers.

[MrLampost]

For reference, I'm running 2 8800gt cards on an XFX Nforce 780i board with a Core2 e7200 and 4gb of DDR2-800.
I'm dual booting XP-32 and Vista Ultimate-64.
The only drivers that run SLI on the Vista side are the 169.25s. Any drivers from the 17x.xx series work fine in single card mode, as soon as I enable SLI it acts like it's doing it, but the screen just stays balck after I hear the "device removed" sound.
With the 169s this is followed by the "device detected" sound and the display pops back, but the 17xs just sit there.

The machine is still running and I can even hotkey to a reset. When the machine boots back up the drivers are gone and Device Manager shows both cards with yellow exclamation marks.

Search gives me nothing except one person describing the same issue and blaming the 4gb of ram with no solution posted.

Is this just an old issue that everyone else has resolved or am I screwed?

XP runs SLI beautifully, and with the latest drivers.

[jcrox]

I have no problems running SLI under Vista x64 with any drivers. Not sure what you're doing wrong there but I don't think it's a Vista issue.

[pingu2]

I have vista64 and 4gb ram and never saw this problem.. not that it helps you much to know that I guess!

[nekrosoft13]

if the other person is blaming 4gb of ram, is your vista fully updated? especially with SP1?

[David power]

I had sli with 2 gigs and with 4 gigs in vista 64bit,

I noticed that vista takes up 1660 mega bytes of ram! i was shocked, when you use 2 gigs it uses 930 ish. thats allot but I feel it puts it to good use,

Have you tried using driver cleaner between installs?

[MrLampost]

SP1 is installed, have run Driver Cleaner several times.

Even did a clean install early on to no avail.

I'd assume it was a setup issue myself if nothing worked, but the 169.25 drivers work perfectly!

Going through the SliZone forums shows a decent amount of people experiencing the same issue, but there seems to be no common cause found or any particular solution either.

One persons solution was this :

Uninstalled all NVidia drivers
reboot
Ran the Guru Sweep
reboot
Installed NForce 9.64
power down
physically removed Vid card #2
booted up, installed 177.41
reboot
all good so far... shut down and install card #2
power up, and noticed Vista installs 'Standard VGA' on the new card (stupid windows!!)
forced Update Driver for card #2 to 177.41
reboot
Enabled SLI, and all worked!

But I REALLY don't want to go through all that for what is really only a minor issue.
The 169s work fine for AOC which is all I play on the Vista side anyway.