Can anyone recommend a good, free diagnostic utility (or 2) for checking NVIDIA video cards?  I've tried AIDA64 but it seems to be more of a benchmarking kind of program. I'm looking for one which will, among other things, check the VRAM and let me know if it has a problem, along with any other components which might have failed or be failing.  I'm not concerned about the performance per se, rather I just want to see if everything is working correctly.  I'm suffering with the accursed "Display Driver NVIDIA Kernel Mode Driver Version xxx.xx Stopped Responding And Has Successfully Recovered" problem and I have to verify that there's nothing in the card itself which might be causing the thing to crash constantly. Thanks in advance...

I never got any advance notice on this at all. Then a bunch of them (email messages) just showed up at one time. I don't even know where to go look for my posts now; when I click on a link it just goes to a blank page. I would have been happy to comply but you didn't tell me until it was too late...

Have you checked the event logs yet? Most likely its a driver/app conflict of some sort. What programs are you using when you see that crash? Do you install the whole NVidia driver when you install them and is clean install checked off first? Are you installing any much older "legacy" type programs? Do you have a soundcard?  I tracked down some of your other threads and believe you said its a GT520, so you may want to go back to a much older driver, start around sept 2014, for stability's sake. If your still on win 10 then that's not an option, obviously. Since you said you checked out all the other components so far, I wont question you about the psu and mobo etc... at this point.