If you've been running on the same drivers for more than a year, sooner or later you're going to run into problems.
Drivers are a fact of life with PCs, especially for gamers.
A driver is simply a piece of software that allows the operating system or an application to talk to a particular piece of hardware. Your 3D accelerator has a driver, your sound card has a driver, even your motherboard hardware has drivers, although those are mostly built into Windows itself. Like any piece of software, a driver can be buggy or incomplete. But a good driver can make up for defects in the hardware. A good case in point is the Savage 2000 graphics chip.