I downloaded the latest drivers and they installed perfectly, this was about 6 months and no problems until recently. Linux crashes upon entering X sometimes with screen flicker and then vertical stripes on the screen. It does not happen in windows. (I dual boot), and I have to scan the harddisk when it restarts, it always fixes the same Inode count. I thought it was dust in the video card but I cleaned it out. It was very dusty. It still happens but not all the time. Strange. I have not installed anything new. I am using mandrake 9.

its not uncommon to have nvidia issues, i'll tell ya that much...
but lets start by saying, did you make all relevant changes to your XF86Config file? if so, then post your /var/log/xfree86.0.log file, also double check and make sure you have pnp os aware disabled and assign irq to vga enabled in your bios...

It works sometimes, most of the time actually perfectly. I started getting a few pixles missing in Windows now also. I thought it was the dust but maybe dodgy card? It is probably not anything to do with either os because of the fact it works most of the time. I took it out and cleaned it and it was better for a while. Maybe overheating? There is random alpha-numeric characters thrown on the screen in text mode and pixels in graphics mode. I will check connections again. Thanks again.