Hmmm, the mobo actually came with THREE CD's (this is America - everything has to be bigger).
"NVIDIA nForce 570 Series Support DVD" (Vista Drivers Inside)
"M2N-SLI Series" (NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI Series Support CD Rev.225.02)
"Vista Drivers Upgrade Kit" (Official Vista Drivers for ASUS Motherboards)
I recall that when I first built this machine, I didn't run any of these CD's - for no other reason than I forgot (Duh!) - and everything ran just fine.
A recent meltdown due to Microsoft and Service Pack 1 for Vista prompted a new install, at which point I did try to run them - they all seemed to conflict with each other, and somewhere along the line an "nvrd64.sys" driver was installed and caused a BSOD with the error message "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL". This caused the machine to crash/reboot/crash/reboot....hence my decision to wipe all from the C; drive, format, start again.
Haven't run those CD's and it all runs beautifully again.
I was, however, prompted by my other thread "mobo & CPU temps" (
http://tinyurl.com/92pnlo) to look for some way of the machine telling me what the BIOS knew about fan speeds and temperatures etc. - just so I could monitor, study and learn. Maybe it's all in those discs then?
I'll get to that later - when I've done a tad more research into what everything does (or, at least, is *meant* to do).
Thanks again, folks.