Time to let go of the frustration, as you can take your laptop to the video driver ball in new glad rags. While trying to get more up to date Vista drivers for my tablet, now that I'm running the latest post Beta 2 build, I came across LaptopVideo2Go.com, a site that produces modified .INF files for Nvidia's stock drivers, so they run on laptops. All you need to download are their modified installer descriptions, use them to replace the Nvidia description file, and run the installer...
A useful resource.
Just a pity that the modified .INF file for 88.61 for my tablet didn't support screen rotation. Ah well, back to the old versions.