FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Minetest has worked fine for me for many months, but now every time I go in I either get:
-Blue screen of death (I'm running vista)
-"display driver has stopped responding and has recovered" but minetest never comes up, just a black screen
-"Access Violations" Sometimes a boatload of them filling up the log

The only way I am able to get minetest to run anymore is to uncheck everything on the settings tab (No fancy trees, no 3d clouds, no shaders, nothing can be checked).

I have a duplicate computer as far as hardware running the same version of minetest and mods, and it has none of these problems.

I'm running stable 0.4.4.

I tried that "video_driver = opengl" thing in the minetest.config. Minecraft has the same problem, the screen just locks up and that always used to work too. I'm going to see if I can download new drivers for my graphics card. I tried re-seating it, but that didn't help.

purge vista, format c: drive and install debian stable - everything will be perfect and you will not see any crashes or bugs
p.s. and it is free

REMOVE any version of proprietary vcard drivers, reboot, make sure you're having default vga drivers for your vcard, install fresh drivers for vista (make sure you're not using xp or win7 ones).

I upgraded drivers from Vista's display properties mechanism, it failed, saying ATI drivers were not installed, I rolled back, did windows update for the heck of it, and everything started working again after days of not working. (Although Chrome browser no longer works, possibly from the frequent crashes or the windows upgrade). I could have sworn my graphics card had gone bad...