Battle Freeze and Blue Screen Crash

[Dave64EVE]

The campaign map runs fine, but the game fails during battles. Sometimes I am just starting a battle right after getting into the game, other times the game can last awhile or may not fail until the end of a battle. The screen goes all wierd (see attchment for image). Sometimes a the "blue screen of death" rears it's ugly head after this weird phase. I have never experianced this before with any game, even previous Total War titles.

I suspected heat may be an issue, so I checked CPU and GPU temps. CPU's idle in the 40's C and GPU's in the 50's. During gameplay they top out at 71 degrees C. From what I understand artifacting doesn't normally occur until upper 80's or 90's. Additionally I DO NOT have this problem with any other game like Oblivion, Crysis, Fallout, Civilization IV--all of these on the hightest settings.

I also tried setting up a big house fan and focused it on the GPU's. It kept them pretty cool, but to no avail.

I have all the latest drivers, especially graphics and motherboard that I know of.

Specs:
Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme x9650 3.00 GHz
Memory: 4.00 GB
Vista 32-bit
Video: (2) GeForce 8800 GTX in SLI

If any body knows how to solve this it would be greatly appreciated.

[Dave64EVE]

To anyone out there who may be having a similar problem, I SOLVED my issue by rollingback my nVidia drivers. I had the most recent driver, but rolled back to the 181.22 driver after noticing it on other posts. Since then I have had NO problems, especially during battles.

My process was to go in through the Control Panel to "Device Manager". I then Uninstalled the display adapters and reinstalled the 181.22 drivers.

[Groove74]

I can also conferm that rolling back to 181.22 will cure most Nvidia related issues.