Hi everyone,

I seem to have issues with my display driver. I keep getting a task bar notification that tells me "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered". This notification pops up after the screen goes black and back to normal. It's been happening ever since I bought the PC. But recently, it's been doing that very often (quiet a few times per day). So yesterday I installed the latest update of my display driver, but that did not solve the problem at all (I think it made it even worse).

I have the NVidia G-Force 240GT, and I'm running on Windows 7 64-bit. Is that strictly a software problem (the driver), or could it be that my graphics card is messed up?
My guess is its either overheating for some reason ( I recently overclocked my card, but for obvious heat reasons, I received this message numerous times whenever I access 3D applications or games) or it might be a defect card. I doubt that it's a driver issue.

Anyway my suggestion is to completely uninstall the nvidia driver then reboot and re-install the latest one. If it didn't work then there must be something wrong with your card.
4 days later
Cleaning the PC from the inside helped a bit, but did not solve the problem completely. I removed piles of dust two days ago. The number of times this problem happens decreased dramatically, but I'm still unsure what the problem actually is. I still suspect it's an over-heating problem so monitoring the temperature of my gfx card could help. Any specific tools that would help me monitor the temperature?

Note though, that this happens mostly when I click on Windows Live Messenger to show it on screen (initially would be minimized), or sometimes when trying to show Visual Studio 2010.
It might be a little off-topic, but I got a dust blower from Compuworld. I wanted a can of compressed air to blow dust off the CPU radiator. They didn't have any, but proposed a cheap air blower. I somewhat reluctantly bought it.
Man that thing is powerful. It is so strong that it can probably be used to blow away dead leaves from your garden. Needless to say, it blew away all dust from inside my PC.
MegaCool wroteMy guess is its either overheating for some reason ( I recently overclocked my card, but for obvious heat reasons, I received this message numerous times whenever I access 3D applications or games) or it might be a defect card. I doubt that it's a driver issue.

Anyway my suggestion is to completely uninstall the nvidia driver then reboot and re-install the latest one. If it didn't work then there must be something wrong with your card.
Yes but if the issue appeared with the installation of the latest drivers, then he should rollback to the recent most stable ones...Such drivers are known and mentioned in forums...such as 258.96 for example.

Now his problems was from the start and increased. So it's most probably not a driver issue, as you said.

@Kassem: Take out the card, dust it off with a dust blower, clean the cooler from all sides with the blower, pop the card back in, and you should be good to go. Raise fan speed if necessary:

RivaTuner
MSI Afterburner
EVGA Precision

These are all good software for raising fan speeds.

Please don't forget to report back what fixes work and what don't. We might benefit too.
rolf wroteIt might be a little off-topic, but I got a dust blower from Compuworld. I wanted a can of compressed air to blow dust off the CPU radiator. They didn't have any, but proposed a cheap air blower. I somewhat reluctantly bought it.
Man that thing is powerful. It is so strong that it can probably be used to blow away dead leaves from your garden. Needless to say, it blew away all dust from inside my PC.
I got one once, for like 20$. Got fried about 30 minutes of use.
I used to have get this same message, turned out to be a driver problem. I cant remember which version because this happened to my system in 2009, the stable release (weird enough) was a beta version.

Some nvidia drivers tend to mess up for no reason, and i don't think its because of overheating.
I had the same exact error , it wasn't a driver's error in my case, it was an overheating problem. Added two fans and cleaned up the pc and it was fixed for a while . I had to buy a new one at the end to fix it completely.

"Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" , this message means the your graphic card is rebooting for some reason
If a WDDM driver hangs or encounters a fault, the graphics stack will restart the driver.[1] A graphics hardware fault will be intercepted and if necessary the driver will be reset.
Drivers under Windows XP were free to deal with hardware faults as they saw fit either by reporting it to the user or by attempting to recover silently. With a WDDM driver, all hardware faults cause the driver to be reset and the user will be notified by a popup; this unifies the behavior across vendors.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#Enhanced_fault-tolerance

so try updating your driver or even installing an older one, and try your card on an other PC (same heating conditions) before you conclude that it is a hardware fault.
I've suffered for a while with that error and it was at the end a faulty hardware.
Download the 257.33 driver , while installing choose custom settings and tick the "clean install".
This removes your previous deiver and installs new one.
Also if your oc-ing the card it might not be stable.
No I'm not oc-ing the card.

But why should I download and install an older driver? Why this one specifically?
275.33 is the newest whql driver from nvidia,sorry i switched the numbers :P.