My problems started about a week ago when I updated my drivers. Since that day I started getting random black screens followed by a "nvidia drivers stopped responding and have recovered" every time I play a game or watch a video. I figured the drivers were either corrupted or my card is dying (gtx 460), so I downloaded Display Driver Uninstaller and ran it, then tried to reinstall the same 355.60 drivers that I originally updated with (without redownloading). This time the installation failed and has failed every time since, even after redownloading. When I try to manually install the drivers through device manager, half the time it works and half it doesn't. Even when it does work and I restart, Windows just reinstalls it's default display drivers, and I'm left with a "Standard VGA Graphics Adapter" in device manager.

So I tried to stop Windows from automatically installing drivers. I go to my device installation settings where I'm supposed to be able to choose between automatically installing drivers or not, but all the options are greyed out and it's stuck on "install driver software if it is not found on my computer". Windows support tells me the administrator probably locked options, but I'm the administrator and I didn't do anything.

After a bit more googling I found instructions on how to change a registry setting through regedit at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU. Unfortunately, the WindowsUpdate folder doesn't exist on my system so I'm out of luck there.

I don't have a system restore point older than a few days, so I can't do that.

Q6600 GTX460 6gb Win7 Pro

I would gladly go back to the constant black screens if it meant that I could just use my pc again...

e: I disabled MSE during all of this just in case, and I'm scanning with Malwarebytes right now.

e2: MSE and Malwarebytes turned up nothing