So I've been having some trouble recently; video-related trouble mostly.
 
Few days ago I had Team Fortress 2 crash a couple times. Didn't think much of it, and it didn't happen afterwards. Today, though, there was a 6MB update to the game that added some cosmetic items.. so they didn't change much, if anything, as far as the game's engine goes.
 
After a bit of playing, though, the game crashed, which produced an event viewer log, claiming that ntdll.dll was the faulting module. After that point, the game would instantly crash when connecting to a server. (You're presented with this "Welcome to Team Fortress 2" screen that you click through, then go on with your match)
 
As soon as that "welcome" screen appeared, the game would crash. After a bunch of frustrating attempts, I updated the drivers to the newest version. Enabled RGB full range, as my monitor supports it (the difference is amazing), and restarted. Everything was fine. Then about 10 minutes in to another game, suddenly the video card quit rendering things properly. I still had audio in the game, but I couldn't see anything. I could see what was behind the game, which was a few other programs.
 
I closed the game, and went to go open a new tab in Firefox to discover.. that it was froze. Nothing in the tabs was rendering (blank white page), which ultimately caused it to freeze. End-tasked, reopened, same thing. So I rolled back the drivers to a much earlier version, and so far I've had no stability issues, except.. low FPS in TF2 now. I can usually sustain over 220 FPS, but it was dropping down in to the 50 range during this match, which is highly unusual for my PC. (Even on a map with a full 32 players, I've always managed to sustain over 200 FPS.)
 
So that brings me to posting here. I've had this video card for a long time, and have gotten great use out of it, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was on its way out. Is that what it sounds like to the rest of you? I'd hate for that to be the case, as I'm currently in a sticky situation money-wise right now, but it starting to fail is all I can think of for games to suddenly start crashing and having issues when they weren't mere days ago, with no change in hardware, software, or software settings.
 
Thanks for the input!
 
Edit: I haven't taken it out and reseated it in a long time; that could be the problem. Also, it's been kept clean, and temperatures aren't exceeding 70c. :)

Sorry, I've been busy trying to determine what's going on with this for a few hours now and forgot to check this thread. Specs are as follows:
 
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (x64)
MB: EVGA X58 FTW3
CPU: Intel Corei7 950
RAM: G.Skill 6GB (3x2GB)
GPU: EVGA GTX570 (I had to RMA my original card from you guys, and am currently using the one sent to me)
PSU: Unsure of the brand just this minute, but it's a modular 750?w.
 
A little while ago I actually had a BSOD while gaming, rather than just having the game crash on me. The entry from the event viewer reads:
 
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck.  The bugcheck was: 0x00000109 (0xa3a039d89b9b8899, 0xb3b7465eee1857ef, 0xfffff80002f3db76, 0x0000000000000001). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 041914-13244-01.
 
All Google searching for a similar BSOD leads to these possible choices:
 
1. Driver issue. (Not sure this is it, as the version of the drivers I was using I had been using for months without issue. I even updated them to the latest version to be sure, and still experienced problems. Then rolled back to a version earlier than my original driver, and that didn't help either. Currently using the original version, 331.65. There had been no other software changes (or Windows updates) prior to this starting, and no hardware changes either.)
 
2. Hardware issue (GPU, RAM, possibly PSU or motherboard). (I've had to RMA both one of my sticks of RAM in the past, and this GPU. I know my hardware is getting old, so it wouldn't surprise me if a component was on its way out. It's all had very heavy use since this build was completed, so I have nothing but good things to say about all of it.)
 
 

This all started before I even did any rollbacks, all of which have been clean installs. It's just gotten worse since then. If checking off "Perform a clean install" on the installer isn't enough of a "clean install", then sure, I guess that could be part of it; but again, it happened before all the video driver changes.
 
But now that you mention Windows update, there was a night last week or so (before any of this started happening at all) that, when shutting this PC off for the night, Windows stated it was "configuring Windows updates" when none had been downloaded or installed, to my knowledge. That's especially strange considering I have it set to specifically prompt me if it even wants to download any.

Thing is, now it runs whenever it feels like it, using as much as 80% cpu. Acting very much like a slaved system.

In my case, so far I've done 3 updates, (none to 7 yet), and once quite a few things were effected, the other two, everything still works. One other oddity, that background process is not in the windows list, but says it's a user process. What with all the spying crap going on, it makes one wonder...