driver issues (I think) please help

Here's the short version of the story: A little over a week ago, my computer started randomly crashing / black-screening whenever it was running any games/3d programs, sometimes even just videos. At first I thought my GPU was overheating, but after monitoring my temperatures, this did not seem to be the case. Next I suspected an issue with my nvidia drivers, but after several un/re-installs, this didn't seem to be it either. At the end of the day, I went back to my preferred driver version (from about a year ago), and went on with my life, hoping to find some other solution, or else possibly send the system in to Sager for diagnostics.

Today I was contemplating reformatting my drive as a possible solution, and as I was looking through my programs list to see how much I would have to reinstall afterwards, I noticed the nvidia software for the newest version (which I had uninstalled before going back to the version I am using now.) I uninstalled it, and my screen temporarily went black, and vista reverted from aero to windows standard visuals. So basically, it was acting as if I had uninstalled the active driver, even though that was not the version I was using, according to my device manager. I decided that a driver conflict may have been responsible for the issues all along, so now I'm trying to get rid of the newer version as thoroughly as possible, and go back to the version I like.

The problem is, I cannot for the life of me get this version out of my system. I uninstall it, reboot in safe mode, and windows automatically reinstalls it. I had tried, back when I was first working on this problem, to use driver sweeper. Every time I tried to run it, it would stop responding. I figured I'd try it again. I uninstalled the (new) drivers from the device manager, and then ran driver sweeper. It stopped responding, but seemed to recover, and asked me to reboot. I did. Upon startup, I got a cmd box that reads C:\NVIDIA\*, Are you sure <Y/N>? I responded y.

STILL windows automatically installed the newer drivers. How is this even possible? Where is it getting them from? I've deleted the installer executable...driver sweeper seemed to work...what the hell am I supposed to do?

EDIT: I'm aware that the driver sweeper instructions say to uninstall the drivers from the device manager, reboot in safe mode, AND THEN, run driver sweeper, but whenever I reboot, even in safe mode, windows just reinstalls the drivers before I have a chance to do anything. It's incredibly frustrating...

 

Are you uninstalling via control panel or device manager? Should uninstall via device manager and check box that says something like "delete current driver software..." Might have to do this to 'clear' the current/older drivers out of the system.

Edit* after re-reading, saw you were doing this from device manager. Are you checking that little box prior to uninstall? Also, in response to your original problem, a faulty video card won't necessarily see high temps.