Were you thinking of stopping by NVIDIA.com to get the latest 196.75 drivers released this week?  Well don’t.  Did you already download those drivers and have them running on your system right now?  Uninstall them and revert back to an older version!  Why all the commotion?  There are confirmed reports now of the 196.75 driver killing perfectly good NVIDIA-based graphics cards by turning off the fan at the wrong time.  Which is pretty much ANY time I think.

Here is NVIDIA’s official response as of 9pm tonight:

NVIDIA 196.75 Driver Alert
We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers do not download this driver.  Instead, please stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers.  Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily removed from our website and we also are asking our partners and others to remove temporarily this 196.75 WHQL driver as well.
 
Here’s a link for instructions on how to roll back your driver.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/driver_rollback.html

NVIDIA 196.75 driver might be a GPU killer - Graphics Cards 2
These could be next!!!

It seems that no matter how hard NVIDIA might be trying to push the positive news out there, they just have had a string of bad luck going start with Fermi issues and ending with…well more Fermi issues.

Oh well, either way, if you these drivers installed get rid of them and stay away!  Or maybe you can use it as an excuse to your significant other that you just HAVE to buy a new graphics card this month…