John Edwards

Having purchased Driver Cleaner and run it preparatory to installing this new driver, I was impressed with what I read and expected great things. However, having installed the driver, I am presently left with a system that EITHER:
a) when booted normally, produces a black screen after the Microsoft progress bar (with no cursor, and no further hard drive activity); or
b) in safe mode, shows my NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS as the display adapter, with driver 175.16 properly installed; or
c) in 'last good configuration' mode, a low resolution screen shows the only display adapter as Standard VGA Graphics Adapter (using a MS driver). Scanning for hardware doesn't find the NVIDIA card, and 'add legacy hardware' against NVIDIA Corporation only shows (NOT under display adapters) a series of Serial ATA Controllers (MCP61 and various nForce types) plus an NVIDIA nForce RAID Class Device.
When installing the new driver, I noticed that the first reboot produced the VGA graphics display and the second reboot produced the black screen.
When cleaning the old drivers, I just used the 'nVidia' filter, so I HOPE that I did not breach the 3rd footnote to the filter table which warns against using the NVIDIA Contol Panel filter when you have a motherboard with nForce chipset installed (I didn't know that I did, but the above information suggests that I do!)
The NVIDIA driver installation instructions have a footnote saying that "Windows may default to 16-bpp colour and disable the Desktop Window Manager (DWM). To work around this issue, set the colour to 32-bpp and then reboot the PC." I don't understand this - or whether it relates to my problem.
HELP!!!!!!!
[I'm running Vista Home Premium WITHOUT SP1, and Core2Duo 1.8Ghz processors.]