sanjiro

rofl was just about to give 9.5.379 a go
will wait till the new one is up and try it out

Update.

Its the drivers with the card.
8 series cards are fine with windows drivers of all versions.
9 series cards are mostly unusable with ANY driver version.
They become more stable when you use the 185.20 driver and activate OpenGl 3 but Houdini still has trouble with them.

Lets get this clear.
This is a driver problem, but its only a problem with Houdini.
PCs able to run Max/Maya/XSI/Lightwave and C4D for days on end fall over with surprising regularity when running Houdini.

To rub salt into this wound we recently purchased a copy of OSX and did a naughty thing putting it onto the test PC we had been running Apprentice on.
Grabbed the OSX version of Apprentice and what do you know.
2 weeks 24x7 and not one crash.

I know this is a driver problem. but what ever conflict Houdini is having with the drivers is just not happening with other apps.
We had been seriously considering moving to Houdini untill this became apparent.

P.S. this problem happens with the GeForce GTX 295 as well so looks like its all cards 9000 and up

This is a problem I faced from the moment I installed Houdini.
For no good reason the Nvidia driver would fail and restart leaving Houdini frozen and black.
Sometimes It would happen after only a few seconds, sometimes after a few hours.

I searched the forums and read everything I could in an attempt to resolve the problem but found little more than off the cuff “Its your hardware” comments.

The system was a Intel Core2 Extreme QX9770 with 16Gig Ram and an nvidia 9800GTX+.

I was using the 78 series drivers and running vista 64

changed the video card to a 9800GT
changed to an 8800Ultra
changed the drivers from versions 69 through to the 81s with no luck.\

Now for all of you out there with this problem…

HERE IS THE FIX
as not using houdini is not an option its too damn fine )

Install the latest nvidia drivers (81.20 when I last looked)
Then download nvemulate.exe from the nvidia developers site
Run it and activate OpenGL 3.0 as it is not activated by default.

good luck and have fun