System Rebuilt--Maya Reinstalled, VERY POOR Performance,
"Graphics Card

We previously has Maya 8 running on a brand-new quad-core Intel system
running Win XP SP2, 2 weeks ago. It ran beautifully and High quality mode
was great on the nVidia GeForce 8800GTS.

However, we had a catastrophe unrelated to Maya, where it was necessary to
format the drive and do a clean install of XP and all our applications.
However, Maya installed, but is not running the same as the first time
around. When our projects open, we get a "warning high quality rendering
mode is not supported by the graphics card" and the UI is so sluggish that
it reminds me of when we used to run 3D Studio on a 386-SX back in the early
1990s. It's difficult to even drag a window across the Maya viewports, as it
lags and redraws every few inches of the way. It's behaving exactly like
when the graphics drivers for the GeForce aren't installed, as during the
bare Win XP installation with generic VGA drivers that XP uses to run the
card until nVidia drivers can be installed.

It seems like we can install the OS, applications and tools over and over
again, in the same manner, but the system results are never consistent. But
this is really disturbing, because Maya is unusuable like this. It's very
hard to rotate view on even a simple model.

We're using the same current version of the nForce driver from nVidia (all
low level drivers are put on a system setup CD so that we have consistent
result by always rebuilding the system with the same drivers). Same driver,
same version of Maya, two VERY different results.

This is a clean new install of the OS and applications, just like the first
time around. Nothing should be any different this time, as all drivers are
the same version.

Now the prevailing question is, how do we fix this?