mobo drivers worth updating?

[jumpy]

Background: I had some trouble with some hidden non plug&play drivers installed by StarForce after I installed a couple of new games on my pc (which I have now finnished). Basically they are interfering with my DVD-RW drive/ide controllers with the reasult that:

For example, here's one of the common problems brought by Starforce: under Windows XP, if packets are lost during the reading or writing of a disk, XP interprets this as an error and steps the IDE speed down. Eventually it will revert to 16bit compatibility mode rendering a CD/DVD writer virtually unusable. In some circumstances certain drives cannot cope with this mode and it results in physical hardware failure (Most commonly in multiformat CD/DVD writer drives). A sure sign of this step down occurring is that the burn speeds will get slower and slower (no matter what speed you select to burn at). Starforce, on a regular basis, triggers this silent step down. Until it reaches the latter stages most people do not even realise it is happening.

I have used the officially available starforce remover tool to get rid of these hidden drivers and I have also uninstalled then reinstalled my optical drive (XP automatically rewrites upon detection of what it then consideres 'new hardware' with it's default driver, I believe).
What I need to know now is if it's worth while installing the latest drivers for my motherboard (nvidia nforce2 drivers) to replace the possibly corrupt ide controllers?
Would I benefit from this in any way, or am I asking for trouble- if it ain't broke, don't fix it - there doesn't appear to be any obvious problems with my machine now and I'd rather be prepared and choose to format my system than have it forced upon me by messing about with the stuff that runs the motherboard.
Should I choose to install these new drivers, can I install over the top of the old ones or do I have to uninstall then install the new driver? I'm sure I did that once before and it crashed my whole system cause the mobo didn't work anymore or something.
Any suggestions are much appreciated.

My current mobo drivers are what came with the manufacturers install disk.

amd athlon XP2800+
gigabyte GA-7N400-L
1GB RAM
6800GT
Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-107D

 

[jumpy]

guess that's a no then...

 

[Street]

Its always best to install the latest drivers... I say go for it. I would uninstall the old ones first and run Driver Cleaner on your PC to remove all traces before I install the new ones.

Usually the ones that come on the manufacturers CD are quite old, and the newer ones will have lots of bug fixes and optimisations in them

 

[pastymuncher]

I tend to agree. Get the latest drivers for your mobo and also see if there are any firmware upgrades for your optical drives.

Starforce is a nightmare and the russian company that owns it is so arrogant. The Starforce websites forum and the game forums that use Starforce are full of complaints about Starforce screwing up peoples optical drives. The only people that Starforce affects are the ones who legitimately buy the games!

 

[AWPC]

Another major problem with Starforce is that on many peoples optical drives it generates a lot of errors so that Nero for instance fails to verify any disk as Starforce messes with the data and thinks its a hack/exploit in progress so denies the optical drive access to verify the data (regardless of data type or even CD/DVD type). You do not usually notice this until you try to play the burned media then discover coaster city as nero may not even report the errors because of the way Starforce hides in the background.

Trouble is that Ubisoft are their biggest fans and all their big upcoming PC games like Resident Evil4, Devil May Cry3, Rayman4, Assasin ,Tom Clancys: Splinter Cell4, Ghost Recon4, Rainbow Six 5, Firehawk will all use Starforce. Some publishers even remove starforce with patches (Midway removed it on the latest Area51 patch).