/me wishes best luck to you :)

well i got another card, a slightley different one, a biostar 6800XE 256mb agp, this time i have the same problem except when in open gl there things look normal but in opengl i cant alt-tab. also open gl in windows = crap framerate

You did uninstall yer old gfx drivers _before_ you put in the new card right? Cos Windows can become pretty shitty if its trying to use more than one GFX card driver...

...just a thought, try boot up in safe mode, remove "all" GFX card related stuffs in the control panel add/remove programs thingy, then also goto start and then click run, and then type devmgmt.msc and click ok (or open the device manager yer fav way) and then click the + next to display adapters, uninstall them all if you have more than one, if you have only one, and it matches your hardware, reboot yer pc, head to http://nvidia.com and download their latest driver fer yer card...

hrmm i didnt actually remove the old drivers just ran the driver install off the cd then installed the newest version from nvidia

well i did what you said and im now using a VERY old driver because that's what came on the cd and it works, im probably not going to mess with it intill i make a backup of some kind, not sure how good the backup util is in win2k

Its crap, use Ghost or dd in Linux or something ;) Glad yer sorted matey! Cos the next step would have meant a new power supply :P

heh ive been there before actually computergeeks has a 680w for 18 bucks