shihonage wrote on Dec 4, 2012, 18:20:
NVidia drivers under Win8 may be experiencing a similar problem to what's happening under WinXP.

Here's something that may work for you (the only thing that worked under XP for me, and I tried everything from safe mode to manual driver installs):

1) start normal nvidia install
2) at about 80% of the install, go to task manager and end process tree for nvidia setup stuff
3) reboot

It really works... at least on XP. There's some bug in the installer that uninstalls the driver at the very end, so stopping it beforehand works.

Soulburner wrote on Dec 4, 2012, 16:02:
To anyone that has problems with the installer failing - you have to:
1. uninstall the current drivers and reboot
2. extract the drivers installer with Winrar or 7zip
3. open Device Manager and find your graphics card. Double click it and select the "update driver" button, then point it to the extracted files
4. The system will install the driver only - reboot just in case
5. NOW, run the installer normally. It will complete without failing.

It's weird. Earlier, I've tried only uninstalling the drivers and running DriverSweeper, but that did not help.