I Figure I Should Take Up One Of These Again+ Computer Woes

It's been some time since I had an actual blog, and I think it would be decent of me to start one up again so I can share some writing and generally have a constructive place to do constructive things away from the noise and confusion of Facebook. So here we have it, the Words From The Man You Should Care About.
I write this from my noble computer, Vera, who seems to have a video card that is on the fritz. When the latest nvidia drivers for the card of its make (A 9800 GT) are installed, my system won't start; it will take me to the loading screen for Windows Vista, where greenish-gray dots appear in the background, but it won't go any further than that. When these drivers are not present, though, and just the standard VGA drivers are running, it will start fine. The dots still appear on the loading screen (And on the CMOS setup screen when I get into that pre-boot) but other than that windows starts and everything else runs fine; I just can use anything requiring Direct 3D, OpenGL or any of that fancy accelerated graphics hoo-hah the kids use these days.
So basically, I'm afraid that my video card might be dying, which puts me in a bit of a bind since I am unemployed and without money. Hopefully I can scrape along this way now as I wait to see if I can do anything. Help from my techie friends would be greatly appreciated at this point.