Din's Curse and most recent nVidia drivers

[Valgor]

Ever since I installed nVidia's most recent release of their notebook-compatible display drivers (197.16), it takes anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes for the main menu to appear on screen,
with lots of HDD activity going on in the background. Before the change, it rarely took longer than a few seconds.
The game also seems to have taken a slight, but nonetheless noticeable performance hit, especially with Monitor Sync checked.

Anyone here sharing my experience?