Well after much headache and two tech support calls to UBI it's all working again. But these .21 drivers aren't completely right either, as my system wont keep the settings when restarting. I have to go to video properties and reset it all after a restart.
But other than that the game is working again.
My advise now is, dont do this if your system is working fine as mine was.
Like nvidia said, "some" customers were reporting card failures with the .75 drivers. That some may have had bad cards to start with, or some other issue causing this.

Personally I dont think it had anything to do with the drivers.

Thanks for the warning about this. I'm rolling back as i speak. I'm wondering if my game was crashing because of this or if my Core 2 Duo 6700 isn't powerful enough lol. :doh:

I think you Duo is fine for the game. I will tell you my EVGA 9800 fan is running high when playing SH5. The game certainly works you hardware to the max! I did rollback when I read this. So yeah, roll back and see what happens.

It does? My old 8800 is barely heating up. Lot of resources going to waste if you ask me. :-?

I rolled back to the 196.21 drivers and had horrible issues with wave stuttering in the game. Went up to 196.34b and all was well again. Using GTX295 / Win7 x64 here

Guess I better roll back... 196.75 here

General Graphics Card Question
 

A friend of mine has some older Dell rig that doesn't have a AGP slot nor a PCI Express port. He is stuck using a standard PCI slot instead. He found a card sold through Powercolor that is a ATI Radeon HD 2400, standard PCI form factor. I think it's 256MB. You think with this card it will be possible to play Silent Hunter 5? You guys are so knowledgeable, I thought I would ask for him here. I have a 2600 PCI-e myself so I don't see that big of a difference, is there? Thanks in advance for any assistance you folks can provide.

Well I tell ya what, im having nothing but trouble since going to this 196.21 driver, and now because they pulled the .75 driver I cant get it back.

I've tried rolling it back but that just gets me the 178. something that was too old for SH5 to run on, thats why I updated to the 196.75 in the first place and SH5 was working perfectly then, as was my computer. But now if I do a reboot the system is lucky if it can get windows loaded with iout the video driver getting into an infinite loop and wont allow the reboot to finish. It did this two times this evening and i thought it wasnt gonna come back at all for a while.
Earlier this evening SH5 did something I hadn't seen it do, the screen went black, and then after several min. I got a message from windows that the driver failed.

Wow, my computer has never done this, ever.
Also upon a successful reboot, the video reverts to the highest possible resoloution, and I have to reset it back to 1024x768 again. And I cant access the advanced panel from the card's properties window, that too has never happened. And it seems that the Nvidia Nview software is no longer there.

Edit: Ok I got things back, I found the 196.75 drivers and run the installer and now Nview is back and all seems healthy again. Now to see if SH5 can run healthy again too.