[Scooby_Doo]

Apparently the latest nvidia drivers (8.17.12.5896) breaks normal mapping.  There isn't even an option in F3 about normal maps.  Could this be when freespace asks the drivers about normal maps it now faultily replies that it's not supported?

[FUBAR-BDHR]

There should be newer drivers then that.  Normal maps and sharers were broke in at least one release but were fixed as of a few weeks ago.

[Scooby_Doo]

According to windows update that seems to be the latest build.

[Hades]

Which card do you have?

You could try nvidia's site to get the drivers, generally a better idea than windows update: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Windows update?  You need to get some newer ones from Nvidia.  All mickysoft cares about is directx

[Scooby_Doo]

Well that seems to have solved it 

[newman]

Yep had exactly the same problem. Windows update said the drivers were up to date so I went and installed newer ones manually, problem solved. I recently had several graphical issues both with max and the game, and traced all of them back to crap nvidia drivers.

[Zacam]

The 258.69 and 258.96 broke parsing of deprecated OpenGL values and array stacks.

this also affected the initial test code shaders, forcing the addition of a #pragma option line. It became a lot more apparent under the go_faster code which handles shader code better and more efficiently (amongst other things) which lead to the shader rewrite in FSU.

260.99 (for both old and new shaders) are the best way to go.

In most cases, it is always best to go with Vendor drivers, not just simple OS drivers (which are really only going to be geared for the OSes benefit).
However, it is not always true that newer drivers are better drivers, it depends a lot on the hardware in question.