my bad - os: vista64 (which has also run great for me)
it ran fine before the upgrade since that is the only thing that was installed (unfortunately I didn't run Gearotic the moment afterwards to see any correlation)
Nothing else installed - apart from MS sneaking dotNet1 stuff in the backdoor although dotNet4 was all there and happy.
Knowing now that it is OpenGL helps alot - thanks
as an aside - I was a longtime NVIDIA owner - on a whim I tried this card and was blown away in the performance AND the compatibility ;D and YES the ATI Console has been problematic for many years it seems.