Serious issue here with 8800gts and 100.54/100.59 drivers.

[tieros]

Did you try booting into Safe mode to see the list of drivers as they were loaded? It might shed some light on which part(s) of the drivers are locking up.

[Slammin]

Run Memtest when in Vista. My guess is you will see errors.

[vas]

Did you try booting into Safe mode to see the list of drivers as they were loaded? It might shed some light on which part(s) of the drivers are locking up.
The thing is, since i dont have a problem booting up with standard vga drivers, i will probably not have a problem booting it in safe mode considering that safe mode bypasses most of the drivers anyway (including the graphics card drivers as far as I understand)....

[vas]

Run Memtest when in Vista. My guess is you will see errors.
Ahhhh, why would u say that....? I already stated that I never get crashes when playing hours of oblivion/ company oh heroes etc.... If I had a problem with my ram it would have surfaced when gaming. Furthermore, I will say this again, this problem NEVER occurs when no drivers are installed (when the card is simply using "standard vga drivers").

Oh and, i can run this config prime stable for hours, so memory errors are definitely out of the question.

[vas]

I have identified the conflicting culprit. After enabling boot logging, I looked through the logs to find the driver that was being loaded just before the nvidia driver (nvlddmkm.sys), it turns out it is the directx graphics kernel (dxgkrnl.sys). There seems to be some conflict between those two, as it prevents the nvlddmkm.sys from being loaded sometimes (thus causing the hang). Furthermore, the reason that this problem doesnt occur when using the standard vga drivers is that the direct x graphics kernel isnt being loaded at all. Now, the problem is definitely not with the directx libraries on my system, because i have experienced this problem on a fresh install of vista with nothing else installed apart from the drivers.,

Hmmmm....., the question now is why does it happen (on some configurations) and whether nvidia even know about this or will bother fixing (if it is even possible). I have logged this bug/problem with their automated system a number of times for all the 100.xx series drivers. However, after looking at their update on the outstanding bugs/issues, this is not part of the list. Therefore I would like to ask anyone and everyone with a similar problem to report it through their automated system: https://surveys.nvidia.com/index.jsp?pi=7498eac864dc1950c8f09e040b4a437a. Since they will most likely not even bother investigating if only one person reports it.

I am not at all optimistic about this being fixed and the only viable/real solution seems to be to just buy an ati replacement (unfortunately with the whole delay surrounding the r600 launch i will have to suffer through months of random failed boots).

[vas]

After googling a bit with a combination of words such as "nvlddmkm.sys", "vista" and "problem" I have discovered a number of issues/reports that are probably related to my problem. Some people would get random bsods at start up, with reference to nvlddmkm.sys (while others would get a blank screen instead, just like me). Some would get bsods while gaming (while others get "nvlddmkm.sys not responding error" instead), others would get the reinitialisation of driver messages. This appears to happen on a variety of nvidia cards and not just the 8800 series. These problems also occur on both the x86 and x64 versions of vista.

To me it seems all these problems are related, just that different configs are able to deal with the problems of rotten drivers differently.

[vas]

Finally a driver set (101.41) that seems to have fixed my problem. After 2 days of using the latest drivers, the problem of a failed boot hasn't surfaced once.

[spaceigg]

that's good to hear! :)