Graphics cards won't work ???

[Inigo_Montoya]

I had been having problems with my nvidia geforce 6800 256mb graphics card. My system would freeze up and give me no response. I would eventually have to push the reset button to get any response at all, just to have the problem happen again in 5 mins. After some investigation (updating drivers, checking nvidia forums) I decided to try a new card, so i got a geforce 6200. This one works 90% of the time. The problems arise when I am gaming. When running warcraft or similar games, the graphics will sometimes go haywire, and I will have to restart the game. If I simply play though it the system will eventually hang.
I have also tried a different brand graphics card (believe it was ATI) and had similar problems.
My next idea would be that the problem is with my motherboard, but I don't want to do a board swap unless I am positive. Suggestions?

list of things I've tried:

Updating all drivers (graphics, motherboard, etc.)
Updating directx and using their troubleshooting procedures
3 different graphics cards, all with similar results

What I'm running:

XP home SP2
3.2 Athlon Pentium 4
1024 ram
Motherboard is intel

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Have you checked your temps. It could be your CPU overheating Is the CPU close to your Video card it could be over heating your graphics card.

 

[Inigo_Montoya]

Have you checked your temps. It could be your CPU overheating Is the CPU close to your Video card it could be over heating your graphics card.

Yeah, temps are good. My case is pretty big with 3 fans and I keep it pretty clean so I don't think heat is the problem. Also the problem happens right after startup with the high-end card, when the system is cool.

 

[sPlAtOiD]

How about your power supply? If its good:
Do you have a really old PCI card not PCIe but PCI. If so try it to see if maybe your AGP slot is going bad.

 

[Inigo_Montoya]

How about your power supply? If its good:
Do you have a really old PCI card not PCIe but PCI. If so try it to see if maybe your AGP slot is going bad.

I don't think it's the power supply, I've tried playing around with that idea. I unfortunately don't have a PCI card to try.
If it is the AGP slot, does that require a board replacement, or can they be fixed relatively cheap? I've never heard of anyone wanting to do that kind of repair.

 

[Trotter]

AGP=new board. You might try a driver cleaner followed by a registry cleaner to make sure that isn't the problem.

I hate when there's not an obvious cause to the problem.

 

[Inigo_Montoya]

AGP=new board. You might try a driver cleaner followed by a registry cleaner to make sure that isn't the problem.

I hate when there's not an obvious cause to the problem.

I ran driver cleaner pro followed by regscrubxp. For a while this seemed to fix the problem, then it came back. **confused** I noticed that I am unable to totally uninstall ntune, which is part of nvidia's controls. Even the driver cleaner wouldnt remove it. Anyone know the trick to this?

Edit: Used Windows installer cleaner to remove it from the program list, so I don't think drivers are causing the problem.

Any other suggestions before I try a new board?