OK, folks, at this point I am completely fed up with nVidia. I cannot find a driver that does NOT crash and I've tried ALL of them, including the beta ones.
 
System specs:
 
Athlon X2 64bit - yes it's old. It does what I need.
Asus M2N32-SLI motherboard - yes it's old. It works.
Corsair XMS2 PC 6400 DDR-800 RAM - 8GB
EVGA Geforce GTX 560 Ti - new card
Asus Geforce 8800GTX - old card
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Toughpower 700 watt power supply
No SLI
Single monitor (DVI)
I don't install the 3D display drivers
 
Games I can't play - Dragon Age: Origins/Awakening, Avadon, some Shockwave.com games, some older PC games
Games that work dispite the crashes - Wizard101, some Shockwave games, some older PC games.
 
The last stable driver I had was v100.65 under Vista with the 8800. Literally. My problems started when I upgraded to Windows 7 and needed to upgrade the driver on the 8800. I think the driver went to 285.something. Anyhow, immediately after reboot, the display driver started crashing to the point I couldn't even browse the web. Uninstall, try new drivers, wash rinse repeat for everything out there. Searching the nVidia forums it appears the driver update fried something on the 8800. Not so sure now.
 
Broke down and bought a shiny new EVGA Geforce 560 Ti. Just got it *yesterday*. Installed it today. I've tried the disk that came with the card (driver version 285.66). Fired up Avadon. Well, the game plays for about 2 minues before the display drivers crash. Sadly, this is an *improvement*. Dragon Age: Origins doesn't even load now. Uninstalled that driver tried the supposedly stable 285.62 drivers. I couldn't even load Firefox before they started crashing. System was totally unusable. Uninstalled that driver, tried the latest beta (295.51). Still same performance for Avadon, but now I get errors when it crashes instead of the "display crashed and recovered".  Uninstalled that driver, tried 290.53. No change for Avadon, but Dragon Age loads and you can complete character creation before it freezes and you have to kill the program. Wizard101 is stable. Firefox is unusable now. Uninstalled that driver, tried 290.36. Same performance for Avadon, Dragon Age and Wizard101. Firefox is even *worse*. The driver doesn't even recover before it crashes again. Finally it locks up the system and you have to reboot. IE appears to be somewhat stable. I got to type this post at least.
 
I'm not looking for the latest and greatest here. I play some fairly old and low graphic games; I'm nowhere near taxing out this card (I don't think I even taxed out the 8800 GTX!) I just want the darn drivers to stop crashing and run the games my 6 year old 8800GTX did with ancient drivers. I'm about ready to send this back and try an ATI card. I'm not sure it can be worse.
 
I'd appreciate any help you can give. Thanks.

I normally uninstall driver's from the windows program remover. Then I check see if any of the folder's got "left" behind if there is any, I delete them.
Restart pc, Boot into safe mode use drive cleaner, restart again then boot normal install drivers and restart pc again.
far as driver's go, I have GTX 570 and I'm using driver's 290.36, haven't had an issue with them. So you might give them a shot.
 

OP. Follow this driver guide here. Best guide on the net. http://forums.evga.com/tm.aspx?m=1174372 I am completely against using driver cleaning software like driver sweeper. Just my opinion.

Really sorry to read this. I do have one question... What Audio drivers are installed in this system?
 
 

I'm going to go ahead and say that, because this install has been borked from the beginning, you back up your files, format that drive and start again.
 
After that it, you download the proper support from Asus and put it on a USB so you can install it.  Do this install after you complete the windows installation, but before you do anything else.
 
Also note, all latest nVidia drivers have an issue with FireFox. so even if you get a fresh install right, FF WILL still crash.
 

FF 11.0 crash with W7? no problems here and im on FF 11.0 about 9Hrs + a day .Watching videos ,games(BF3) and browsing.Surprised some are having issues 

Simba123

I'm going to go ahead and say that, because this install has been borked from the beginning, you back up your files, format that drive and start again.

After that it, you download the proper support from Asus and put it on a USB so you can install it.  Do this install after you complete the windows installation, but before you do anything else.

Also note, all latest nVidia drivers have an issue with FireFox. so even if you get a fresh install right, FF WILL still crash.

 
He said "borked"

What cpu do you have?
 

3, nary an issue. It's not specifically related to FF, I'm running 11b3

I do not think it is the MB not being compatable because my wifes running and Asus a7n8x with a 1.8ghz cpu running win 7 ultimate fine. It still has the same Bios that it came with.  To me it sounds like you upgraded from vista to 7 and did not do a fresh install. If you did the upgrade something could of not installed properly which could of been the cause all a long. I