Nvidia users, beware windows update!

Here's a word of warning to anyone out there using a HP Pavillion laptop running an Nvidia graphics cards: beware of "automatic updates" on Windows Vista!

I was running a manual update yesterday (I don't trust M$ enough to let them update automatically, they've buggered up too many machines on me), and one fo the updates that windows was telling me I should install was the "NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller". Foolishly I let windows decide that it knew what sort of hardware drivers should be on my machine and checked it for install. Next thing, after I did the obligatory "windows has updated a trivial non-critical piece of software so you must restart" reboot, I realised I had a problem. Windows started no probs but nearly immediately after logging in, my display went crazy, the usual kind of shit you get when a graphics driver has gone screwy. tried rebooting but then got a bigger shock - even the BIOS screen was screwed up! My screen at the moment is a sort of mustard color with a few pixels flashing in the background in a slightly different shade of mustard, in the sort of pattern that indicates it's trying to display about 12 desktops at the same time.

Normally in this situation I'd just curse microsoft under my breath and roll back to the last system restore point before the update, which I've had to do many times before. This time tho it's different: even the BIOS start-up screen is shagged so I can't even see to get into safe mode! Hell, I can't even see the options to activate the system restore partition that comes with the laptop (my only easy way to do a reinstall as no manufacturers ship CDs any more)! System is totally fucked! Am going to have to go off and try to find an install CD for something that lets me access my HD to hose out the fecking bad driver! :-(