Odd.
It sounds like a corrupt install or something, but you say that it happened when you installed it to your XP partition as well. And now for the obligatory "Are your disks scratched?"
Just getting that out of the way. My modern rig is going through yet another major hardware change ATM, but I do use NVIDIA cards and I'll be installing TSL in it before too long. I'll see if I experience anything similar. I do know that I have up-to-date NVIDIA drivers on my old P4 and TSL isn't experiencing any problems on it, though it has a 6800GT, which is a DX9 card.