NVIDA FX5500 goes to sleep...HELP?

A week back I installed an EVGA FX5500 AGP card into my older box. It was working okay until the other night when it went into a suspend/sleep mode while I was online.

When I boot into safe mode, it will give me the 640x480 screen but when I try a normal boot, right after the splash screen, it will go into a suspend mode and it not come out. I can see that the HD activity indicator continues to boot and the MSI mobo LED's does not indicate a hardware issue.

The drivers are Forceware V 81.98 for 98SE/MEand I've tried the EVGA and regular NVIDA drivers. When I try to remove the program in the add/remove section, I get an illegal operation error message and it terminates.

Since the old Sparkle 300W PS was marginal, I replaced it with a Cooler Master, Real Power 450. I would not think it is a PS related issue.

Even on my clean back-up drive which had a smooth driver install, I have problems. That drive is sterile from the net, and holds the basic OS and photo data.

Thoughts?

Try placing the card back in the computer that you took it out of. I have a few questions.

1. Did you upgrade to a newer card and then placed this in the older system?
2. Have you ever used this card in the older system?
3. Is the older MB using the latest bios update?
4. What type of monitor and resolution/hertz is the card set at?

1. DL'd the latest drivers into a seperate folder first.
2. Uninstalled the old drivers, powered down the system then removed the old card.
3. Installed new card, booted to Safe mode and ran the driver installation.
4. Rebooted and set the display settings.

Mobo has the latest BIOS updates.

Monitor is an IIyama 450 19" at 85 Hz, set at 1280x1024 card is also at 85 Hz.

Called the store this morning and he said bring it in and we'll exchange it. So far, it's been up 10 minutes...fingers crossed.

For future reference: even if where you got it from wouldn't take a return/exhange, eVGA and BFG both have good warranties (not the "if it wasn't DOA, we're calling it your fault, and we don't care," kind that have become the norm), and good service.

Thanks for the tip, had heard about their good warranty service from EVGA.