Sonny, on a whim today I decided to try your solution again. I had extracted all the NVIDIA files as suggested by Reg, and I thought maybe a combination of the two might work. I uninstalled the generic driver, and rebooted the computer. When it restarted, it automatically found the 8600 GS driver and installed it, and rebooted just fine! For some reason, it took a combination of both to get it done.
Many thanks to both Sonny and Reg, my laptop is finally up and running!!!