I've had a problem for a while now.

I will be playing STO (or CO) and suddenly my game freezes, I can't alt-tab, but I can ctrl+alt+del to force it to minimize. On my toolbar in Windows Vista, a little yellow triangle with an exclaimation point appears, if I can get to it quickly enough, the icon will display a tooltip that says "Display driver crashed, but recovered." or something to that effect. I can re-maximize the screen and go on with my game now.

However, I would prefer this didn't happen at all, and while I've been on tribble, my screen has gone totally black for several seconds while the display driver crashes and recovers.

I believe the problem is on my end, perhaps a setting that is off...

I run:
Windows Vista 64 bit
GPU: Nvidia GTX 285 (most current drivers as of 7-3-11)

Any help would be appreciated.

Mhh could be anything, STO related (But doubtful)

First thing you could try is updating your videodriver, downgrading your videodriver, if this doesnt help, you can exclude your drivers from the list of possible causes.

It could have to do with that you are running Vista, which is not exactly the most stable operating system there is.

Last not but least, perhaps your Videochip or Videomemory is borked? Very small change tho. Otherwise you should check the videocards temperature since when the temperature goes too high it could also cause this kind of behavior. You arent overclocking your card or anything right?

Ive had the same kind of problem with my ATI card a while back, but it seemed not to be related to my Video card at all. (Or the game for that matter)

After running some extensive Memory Tests (Memtest i.e.) I found myself with a bad Memory chip showing me the exact same error in the exact same spot.

Well, thats about it. lol.

my hunch (based on my luck) is this is the culprit right here...

I've ruled out temperature problems, a few months back when I tried to deal with this issue I started keeping an eye on the Nvidia system monitor tool, the memory usage and temperature seemed fine then.

I'm not overclocking the card, no.

I read through other cryptic forums and saw someone reccomend Driver sweeper to get rid of old drivers, which I have not done (though this was specifically for beta test drivers, which I've never messed with). Perhaps I should try this?