Spent a lot of time on chat with a nvidia person. She reckons the vbios is corrupt.
She pointed me to a bios installer that executes in windows.
Unfortunately, the gpu needs to be active for the bios installer to work- if the motherboard gpu is operative it won't recognize the card.
This is problematic because whenever the gpu is active windows doesn't display.
Any ideas? What would help is a script that would run this installer and then restart the computer- before login, that would not Work in safemode (so I could disable it when it did it's job)
What would also help is a fairy god mother and/or liberal amounts of sorcery.
The card is covered by warranty but this is Brazil- I might need to send this thing to Sao Paolo to get it looked at, or even back to Ireland where I bought it.