allright my dads card died i ordered him a new one it arrived today and he went ahead and installed the ati driver (from the cd that came in the box even for crying out loud) right over the nvidia drivers of the old card
this left him very surprised when games or anything else that actually uses the cards functionality decided to not cooperate
(lesson 1: never under any circumstances allow your parents to have admin rights on their pcs)

so anyway does anyone know a good freeware driver cleaner that will get rid of the resulting mess?

When I bought my Nvidia card, going from ATi
I used Guru3D's Driver Sweeper - Here
Did the trick Most of all... Freeware, Supports x86 and x64 andd works on Win7

yeah everyone uses driversweeper