Yes, you make good points. Additional information is that the bios is up-to-date. I tested the new 9600gso on another machine and it works perfectly. I have not reinstalled Windows 7 at this point. With the new 9600gso card I get only a black screen - not even a boot screen. With the old 6600gt card, I do get graphics. The only driver that works with the old card is the Windows generic nvidia driver. If I install the real nvidia driver from nvidia, I get a fault indication in device manager with the message that Windows shut down the nvidia driver because it was not working properly. Because I cannot get even a boot screen with the new card, I potentially would have to re-install the OS twice. Once to fix the problem and a second time to install the new video card. Thanks for your thoughts.
Have you updated your mobo's chipset driver...(northbridge Nvidia nForce4 sli) from Asus web site to make sure you have all the latest drivers? If that doesn't work it might be that some thing on mobo has gone bad relating to you display problem.....ie chipset. If that's the case a new mobo is in order. It happens.