UT3 Game breaking issue! Physx/drivers/GFX card... i cant find the culprit!

[†TYRANICK†™]

Ok this has gotten painful.

I have no idea what is going on but...I just installed the latest beta Nvidia drivers, the .92 ones first, tried running the game, works fine for a while...went to load a physx map...dead crash to desktop with 3!! Error reports at once, what the hell?

So I went and downloaded the .83 version which I assumed to be the one I was supposed to use for these physx maps to work...but nope same issue.

But the sheer game breaking issue is that...after i've loaded UT3 up once, attempted to play any physx map and failed with a crash, when i go to load the game up again...the whole screen goes black and 1 of 3 things happen.

- The trailers "play" but I cant see them then i'm stuck and have to restart on the machine
- The game crashes on load up, and the screen turns into that horrible 8-bit mode and what I would assume is nv4_disp.dll error or something
- The game will do the same thing, the caution box sound will play, locks, have to restart.

Now when the computer boots back up, system tells me of a "serious fatal issue" thingy error report...so I send the report, and a new webpage pops up saying this:

"Error Message: STOP 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER (Q293078)"

Microsoft support talks abouts:

"This issue might occur if the graphics adapter is caught in an infinite loop while it waits for the video hardware to become idle. This issue typically indicates a problem with the video hardware or that the graphics adapter cannot program the hardware correctly."

Further down it says this which i think may help:

"If a driver is listed by name in the Stop error message, disable or remove that driver"

So this Q293078 driver is apparently responsible for this but...where do I find it?

This Is kind of worrying because, this has only started to happen after I uninstalled the 175 official drivers...I could try reverting maybe?

Specs:

See "My System" tab under my name

Now...the thing is also is that other games DO NOT report or attempt to replicate this same error. Warmonger which is ran on Physx runs perfectly at all times on these current drivers with the GPU Physx now enabled..not that I play it much.

Ok back to UT3. The other issue is that, even After I un-install these physx maps, the game seems to only crash on custom maps :S.

Worse case scenario, my GFX card is buggered up somewhere...best case scenario, i've installed some dodgy drivers.

Also some games seem to exhibit...strange flashes of "white and black squares" in the top left/right, bottom left hand side of the screen...but no visual artifacts are detected at all.

So...does anyone have any ideas? Any tools or programs to scan and check if my GFX card is running correctly?

Decreasing HWA just makes Nvidia whine to me, also no game will run.
No artifacts at all on GFX card

Any constructive help would be greatly appreciated

-extra info-

Fully patched game to 1.3
Happens on low or high graphics.
Display error only happens with UT3 + the STOP error
STOP error happened ONCE when playing GRID during a race

EDIT!

I just looked in event viewer and guess what I saw for one of my UT3 errors:

Faulting application ut3.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.1.2600.5512, fault address 0x00012aeb.

Those numbers in bold appear under the Creative SB X-FI driver details...file name certified by windows called and located in:

C:\Windows\system32\wdmaud.drv

Sound card issue?

But it doesn't explain the other crashes, or the crashes on the Physx maps...or just now, when playing on a 2nd map...another CTD with the "8-bit" mode error again...nv4 disp error again I assume.

Bare in mind also 1 of my Sticks of RAM is bust...and crucial have reported my RAM as being "faulty from the start" and are currently issuing me a new "revised" version soon as can be, so I'm only using 1 gig of my normal 2x1 gigs of RAM.

Could a RAM issue stretch this far, especially with that stop error and the odd event viewer crash report? Could reverting back to 175 gfx drivers fix the issue? Have nvidia released dodgy drivers that break UT3's Physx maps? Or does UT3's 1.3 patch break the physx maps? 4-dontkno

Any help at all, would be great!