I know I'm posting this right as NAB starts up, so here goes nothing.
Just upgraded all the Avids in our office to MC7. Three z400 stations and a z420 all running Windows 7 64-bit SP1. Everything went smoothly until we came to the last workstation, mine. Installed all new software without a hitch. Last thing I went to do was install the nVidia driver in the folder path
C:\Program Files\Avid\Utilities\nVidia\nVidiaDriverInstaller_331.65
The installer usually goes through the process and then prompts for a reboot to continue installation. That didn't happen this last time, so I clicked finish. Opened up Avid and did NOT get the "GPU display driver mismatch" error meaning that Avid saw the 331.65 driver was installed. Great! Went to reboot and after the "Starting Windows" splash I get a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) stating "Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed."
I booted into SafeMode and tried installing the driver from there, but with the same results. Long story short from that point, I tried to revert to an earlier restore point but they were all corrupted, could no longer boot into SafeMode anymore, and had to do a complete reinstall of the OS, programs, ISIS client, everything.
From that point I had everything up and running, except for that driver. Created a new restore point. This time I tried the driver in the "previous" folder, 320.78 (noting in the ReadMe that it was for Windows 7 and the newer 331.65 driver was for Windows 8 only, even though it successfully installed on the other avids). The installer ran, but it never prompted for a reboot. So I rebooted manually, and after the "Starting Windows" page I got another BSoD stating the same thing. Was able to successfully restore back to me restore point before the driver install.
Contacted nVidia support. Guy in the online chat said "The Settings on the computer are not getting saved." They scheduled a call and over the phone walked me through installing a newer driver 332.76 successfully. Rebooted and everything was working... except MC7, because the 332.76 driver wasn't certified. We then tried to install the other two drivers (331.65 and 320.78, respectively) with installers downloaded directly from the nVidida website, thinking that the installer that unpacked with MC7 might've gotten corrupted. Same story, though. Installer never prompted for a reboot, and after a manual reboot I get a BSoD.
So the nVidia guy said to try and use the 332.76 driver, since MC7 will still start up and let me edit. About an hour after I get off the phone with him, displays go dark for a second and come back up with MC7 gone and an error stating: "the nVidia OpenGL driver detected a problem with the display driver and is unable to continue". In the taskbar I get a notification stating that "nvidia driver has stopped working and recovered successfully".
What possible issues could there be? Do I need to update something in the OS? I have 105 important updates qeued, but only because I just did a clean install.
What would you try?
EDIT: Forgot system specs and a quick note. Half of the PCs are custom built to mirror the z400 specs, and the other half are HP Avid-certified z400s. Two Quad-core Xeon E5620 @2.40 GHz, 16GB RAM. Has been running MC5 through MC6.5 smoothly. All PCs are connected to an ISIS 5000.