Reformatted->Clean Installed Win 7 64->Game's playable again...

...kind of.

I wiped my drive and re-installed Win 7 64.  I ran Windows Update and installed everything including all optional updates.

I'm using a 2500K stock, 8GB ram, and a GTX 970 with most recent drivers.  I'm running the game on ultra, except that I have to turn off tessellation completely otherwise there are flickering lines popping up everywhere.

I have played for a couple of hours without crashing except for the following:\

1.  The game froze when I was on the journal screen and I had to ctrl-alt-del

2.  I tried to alt-tab, the game froze and I got the "driver has stopped working" error

But I played the game for a longer stretch than I have in almost a month.  The sad thing is...I can't really get back into the game.  All of the trouble that I've had with it destroyed the immersion pretty much completely. 

Obviously this is not a solution for everyone because I was planning on doing a clean install of Windows anyway.