For the past few months my GeForce 450 drivers have been acting up, and my computer was actually unusable until I disabled just about all hardware accelleration for the card.

Is it possible that the new drivers for this card are so unstable just because nVidia is trying to thwart this type of hack?

If that's the case, totally unacceptable to cripple my machine just because they want to prevent other people from altering their cards (which I will immediately begin to look into how to do myself now).