Nvidia drivers bugging out

Well this is lovely, second driver update I’ve tried with this card and, once again, it doesn’t work. Top notch. 10/10, would try again.

I tried to install my drivers on top of my old drivers, the uninstall utilities USED to work right, it got to about 1/4th done and hung for about 15 minutes and then decided it wasn’t going to modify the system. Okay, I’d done this before, sometimes you can fix it by self extracting it into the directory because the .exe is messed up. Nope. Now whenever I try I got the following error:

“You are running a 32 bit version of Nvidia installer on a 64 bit system (Binary type I386).
Wrong version of installer. Uninstaller exits now.”
(Aside, who wrote that last sentence? Did Nvidia open a branch in Nigeria recently that I wasn’t told about?)

Oh, you thought that was the issue? Nope! Doesn’t end there, it then proceeds to ignore its own error message and launch anyway, then it gives me this error message:
“Setup detected that the system in use is not Windows Vista [64-bit]/Windows 7[64-bit]. This setup program and its associated drivers are designed run only on Windows Vista [64-bit]/Windows 7 [64-bit]. The installation will now be terminated.”
Since they can’t seem to decide whether I’m running 32-bit or 64-bit let me inform you that I am, indeed, running 64-bit Windows 7.

Now if I hit okay it will hang for a second, then pop up the first dialogue again before exiting the installer. (Why? Who knows!)

I figured maybe I had some contaminated files or something so I went and uninstalled everything, restarted in safe mode, and used Driver Sweeper to clean up all the mess that might have been left around. Restarted tried it again and… same series of error messages. I literally have no trace of an Nvidia file on my computer (even in the registry) and I’m still getting the error. I ever tried re-downloading the installer. Now I got curious and tried installing in safe mode. Well… I don’t get the error message, but it still hangs at 1/4 and then decides it’s not going to modify my system.

Any ideas? Google seems silent.

Okay, more information… kind of.

I found I can still run setup from the folder it extracts to or by manually extracting it, but it (again) hangs at about 1/4 but instead of going for 15 minutes and giving up the bar immediately rushes full and says the system has not been modified. The bug I mentioned in the post is from something even weirder I found. Apparently, the self-extracting exe is actually forced into Windows XP SP 3 compatibility mode, by that I mean if you go into the compatibility tab it has the box checked that says “run in compatibility mode for” and XP SP 3 selected, but also grayed out so you can’t change it. I tried running the driver setup alone in SP 3 to see what happened, and sure enough I got the exact same series of errors. For comparison, I downloaded the international UK English version and it does not have this bug, but does contain the 1/4-th problem.

So it looks like that problem was sort of a Red Herring, anyone have any idea how to fix the install-abandoning problem?

Okay, nevermind, I fixed it. I’m not sure exactly what I did, but I fixed it. The best guess I have is that I also uninstalled the 3D display controller from device manager on top of the normal display devices. When I booted into safe mode it let me install it fully that time. I’m not sure that’s exactly what did it, but that was the last thing I tried.