Back in July I installed some terrible Nvidia drivers which caused periodic system crashes and may have damaged my videocard. Checking the Event Viewer showed that the crashes were associated with nvlddmkm.dll, which I assume is a driver file.
I tried uninstalling the drivers, resulting in a hang during the installation process with my GPU fans spinning like crazy. A reboot and another reinstall of the drivers seemed to fix the issue, and I have since updated to new drivers which supposedly fixed the crashes associated with 320.18. I'm currently running 326.80, but I still get intermittent crashes (screen lockups and BSOD) since then. Event Viewer continues to show that the nvlddmkm.dll service sometimes hangs right when the crash occurs.
So now I'm wondering, are the issues I'm seeing related to ongoing problems with Nvidia's drivers, or is my GPU permanently (but only slightly) damaged? I'm running Win7SP1 and a GTS 450, if that matters.