Well, I need to apologize to Vista. It wasn’t her fault. The rogue was the latest nVidia driver, GeForce Release version 175.16 (May 16, 2008). Checked out the nVidia Forums and it seems like there have been complaints about this version being buggy (which it is!)
So I downloaded an earlier driver, version 169.25 (December 20, 2007) installed it, and rebooted. Perfect! Hope this will help someone out there having similar problems.
[...] woes, Part 4 OMG, you’re going to laugh at me, but that recent nVidia driver (see this post) has screwed up my system. So I ate humble pie, completely uninstalled it and let the OS choose an [...]