m17xR1 Battle for Middle Earth 2 Freezes

I've got the urge to start playing BfME2 again and installed it on my m17xR1. The game will freeze after about an hour of game play but it seems this happens only when you are in battle and when you are moving about the map in the strategic phase. I have to shut of the computer and turn it on again to past this. Ctrl, alt, del, won't work--nothing else but pushing the power button. I have tried using other nVidia drivers and the only driver that seems to "fix" this issue is 186.64. All of the newer drivers won't work. The other games I play work better with 26X.XX drivers, not to mention that I have to put up with stuttering with the old 186.64 driver. Is there anything that can be done to make all this better?

 

The Verde drivers are known crash culprits on 260/280M cards. I wasn't having any crashes on the Verde drivers (disabled Flash/WMV gpu accel) until I installed The Witcher. That game hated them.

Batboy has some modified 197.52 drivers which work pretty damn well and stop the crashing.

 

I applied a fix found in this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...idia-verde-drivers-bsods-freezes-m17x-r1.html

I disabled PCIE Gen2 in the BIOS and the game has not crashed, even with the current nVidia drivers!