AE and Nvidia graphics drivers
 

I found a weird problem the other day. I should probably take it to Adobe or someone (most likely nvidia's fault actually) but I want to make sure I haven't just forgotten to tick some box first.

I use AE7 pro (yeah, I know. I'm too slack/cheap/busy to mess around upgrading) on XP 32 (see previous excuse) with an Nvidia 8800gts.
The fairly ancient drivers I've been using for a long time have served me well. I even recently got a big new widescreen monitor and everything has been fine. Great even. Until the other day when some game's problems insisted I get the new ones (Red Faction Guerilla, if you must know).
I upgraded from version 178.24 to 266.58 and something odd happened. After Effects became almost completely unusuable. The GUI was incredibly slow. I mean it would take a minute or more to respond to any input, say to change a composition tab or drop down effects options or change a setting. How long it took was directly proportional to the size of the window. The only way I could make it usable was to cram everything up in the corner of the screen (somewhat defeating the purpose of my nice big monitor for working on HD footage).

My only thought was, What on earth...? Fidgeting with settings proved futile (and besides, everything worked fine with the old drivers. I even rolled back to prove it).

Being old software on an old OS means it's not something that shows up in help forums very easily. Have any of you folks heard of anything like that happening before?