opengl driver problems with GTX580

i am getting random and sporadic opengl driver failures from BGE, sometimes the system just closes blender and gives an error message like ‘opengl drivers not responding, restarting drivers’ other times the system completely freezes.

I am running BGE inside blender with a nvidia GTX580, driver version is 331.56 on win7 64bit

maybe related, maybe not, blender also randomly crashes when using cycles viewport render and changing material settings, especially reflectivity seems to be prone to this.

the card itself seems to be fine, various other applications using directx and opengl run just fine even under heavy load.