Last week I started getting some strange issues with my video card (ATI HD4850, installed in the same system for almost a year now).
While doing menial tasks like checking email the system seemed to freeze for about 5 seconds. During this time the mouse still moved but nothing was usable. Then the screen went black for 1/2 second and when it came back on everything seemed fine and there was a warning in the lower right of my taskbar that read "Windows recovered from failed display driver AMD".

This happened last tuesday, then twice in thursday. I took it upon myself to go grab the newest CCC (10.5) and install it. Once the install was complete the customary requirement to reboot didn't show up so I went ahead and rebooted on my own. Everything went downhill from there.

As soon as the computer finishes booting there are some green artifacts along the taskbar. When I first move the mouse green artifacts shimmer along the horizontal plane of the mouse and after maybe 30 seconds I start getting the same "windows has recovered from failed display driver AMD". They repeat over and over and the system is entirely unusable. Opening ANYTHING causes the frequency of the problem to increase until I get a dark blue screen of death that runs a RAM dump and then reboots.

I tried starting in safe mode to use the windows system restore feature but discovered it was turned off (not something I remember doing). I tried uninstalling the newly updated drivers but that does not work from safe mode. After many attempts to boot up "normal" I managed to uninstall the ATI drivers but could absolutely not get any old or new drivers to install before complete failure of the system would occur.

I removed the card and installed an NVidia card I had laying around which seems to be giving me no problems for now but has anyone else experienced bad 10.5 driver updates to their ATI card in Windows 7 64bit? I'm not sure if my card was on the way out and the new drivers sped that process up or what. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

CCCleaner in safe mode will totally get rid of it...your card may have gone gonzo as well

My research has turned up CCleaner used in safe mode as one of the most recommended methods of cleaning out the old drivers too, but I thought I'd wait until I heard from someone first hand.
So I guess that will be my next step.

Thanks Steve-O.

I have never had to use it, so I don't know how many CCCCCCCC's are in it heh.

CCleaner didn't really find much to help with after the drivers were uninstalled already, but what a sloppy uninstall as there were parts left all over the place.
I found a similar ATI card to test and it didn't show any of the same problems, so I reinstalled the most current drivers (10.5), the swapped back my original card and everything seems great. It must have been some driver install glitch.