Been running this driver since release with no issues whatsoever. Considering that it's still the same 375/376 branch (started to roll out in late October) I find it very unlikely that your problems are driver related.
People tend to blame too much on drivers these days.
I appreciate that you have been running fine, but I don't see how that applies to me as I had the issue I mentioned.
I blame the drivers because with my limited knowledge and testing it was the only thing that did the trick, but you seem knowledgeable so if you can tell me with 100% certainty what was what caused my error I will absolve Nvidia of any and all faults.
Nothing in EventViewer? Hard locks usually mean the driver couldn't recover and just hung. Usually happens if you get several driver crashes after eachother. Your EventViewer should tell you if that was the case.
Other than that, it definitely sounds like an unstable OC to me. Weird that it works fine on an older driver though. Keep in mind that even with an unstable OC some games might run just fine. I've had issues in the past with unstable factory OC's, and some games never crashed despite that, others crashed regularily.
From what I remember it was the general critical error for unexpected rebooting or loss of power (41 I think?) and not a particular driver error.
And I know it's expected that an unstable OC causes this. It's not my first time doing it, so it was the first thing I troubleshooted. I'm not going through everything I did before rolling back to old drivers, but I checked power management settings, thermals, tested memory, hardware connections, OC on and off, AV, pagefile settings, reinstalled the new drivers, changed game settings and some other things. I've fiddle with my computers for about 15 years now, but I do admit I'm not a software or hardware expert or IT guy, or even a very knowledgeable enthusiast. I use my limited knowledge and google for these things and I definitely don't do it for fun, just when things break on me.
The bottom line is, on the old drivers I have been playing without issues, and like I said above I tested the OC settings on games and benchmark programs running stable for, I'm guessing, around 100 hours of game-time/testing combined. Fair enough, I realize it could have been stable until it wasn't, but I was able to replicate the issue without OC in most of the games I had been playing. I reinstalled The Witcher 2 to see how Ubersample fares nowadays and ended up doing a full 30-35 hour run from start to finish because I love the game. 0 issues with it. I regularly play FIFA and Marvel Heroes which aren't really demanding games and for which I don't need or use the OC at all, and I played The Division with OC on for about 12 hours during the weekend (gorgeous game btw). The first game that hanged on me was TW2. Then Marvel Heroes, GTA V, and Skyrim which I haven't played that much but had taken for a spin with OC no problem.
After turning the OC off, all of the above hanged after about a minute (couldn't test The Division because the free period had run out). All things considered, it was a very predictable, very easy to replicate issue. It seemed that everything that could tax the card even a little would cause the system to hang, regardless of settings, OC or anything else. Then I did the other kinds of testing I pointed out above including a clean reinstall of the latest drivers. Finally I went to the old drivers and used most of my day to do another round of game and benchmark testing, OC on and Off, and it was the only thing that worked. So I'm partial to believing something in those drivers disagrees with my setup.
Although the "driver has crashed and recovered" error (which is a different error I got with a different driver release) is something that has happened to me on and off with completely different PCs over the years, and from what I can gather in that experience it was always or mostly related to driver releases.