"Display driver stopped responding..."

[crisw]

I would think the similarity may be in that both Pro and many games make use of OpenGL.

[bgrant]

I LOVE IT WHEN A PROBLEM GETS SOLVED!
I'm finally back to being able to render 'final views' on my laptop without crashing. Seems the problem was that the fan on my laptop COOLER was OFF (all the time I thought it was on) and the video card was probably getting too hot whenever I tried to render. This was one of the possibilities put forth by NVIDIA/VISTA users in my Google search who were receiving the same error message that I was.
In my final 3D renderings I'm now seeing shadows and realistic textures and triangles of light and .... YEA ME!!!