LoTRO, Why do you hate me so?

First, I have to say, LoTRO is awesome! I know a lot of my friends don't exactly like it, but that's because they're WoW addicts and honestly don't give other games a decent chance (I know this, because I've done it myself too. "Nothing can compare to WoW!").
Anyhow, Nate convinced me to download the LoTRO trial (I've wanted to try it, but never thought about actually downloading it...silly me.), which took about, 4 hours I'd say, to download the normal version (3.9 GB, high res is almost 7 GB I think!). Anyhow, my video card is the minimum requirment for LoTRO, so the first thing I did once it was done updating was crank all the video settings as low as they'd go, just in case, and I figured if it worked fine I could turn some of them up a bit.

For the first little while, things ran smoothly, no noticeable lag or problems with the graphics (besides them being really blurry from being on the lowest settings possible) and I fumbled my way through to about level 3 before suddenly all the movement on the screen stopped. For a brief second, I thought I was lagging, until a mass jumble of insane colors showed up across my screen...and let me tell you, I was not happy.
Now, I'm not a computer genius or anything, but I can figure out when my video card is being worked too hard, so I managed to exit LoTRO and restarted my computer. I've never really had problems with games not working on my computer, so I thought maybe if I just update the drivers, that would solve the problem. So, I updated as many as I could (some hadn't been done in a while, to be honest) and restarted and tried LoTRO online again. Things worked fine, and I thought maybe updating the drivers had fixed the problem. But after about 20 minutes or so, it happened again and I had to restart again. After a few more random tries, re-checking the video settings, updating the driver for my monitor even, it would still do the same thing after about 15-45 minutes, so I gave up and went back to my normal game, WoW.

I've only ever had minor problems with WoW, and these all happen after major-ish patches and are solved fairly easily and fast, so I was surprised when suddenly characters on WoW were showing up as straight black, and instead of seeing smoke from fires, I saw huge black squares swirling up the screen. I thought this was weird, and thought maybe WoW was conflicting with LoTRO, but didn't want to uninstall LoTRO yet since I hadn't even had it 24 hours. I closed down WoW, and noticed that my whole PC was being incredibly slow, so after I restarted I opened WoW again to see if it would happen again. After about half an hour, the same thing happened again, but I wasn't able to exit WoW at all, so I had to restart the computer. This time, I uninstalled Lotro and got rid of all the files (/cry), restarted the computer and tried WoW yet again. Same thing still happened, and an error report window for WoW came up. I sent off the error report, and this time my PC wasn't lagging, so I opened WoW again so I could see what my video settings were at, but instead of opening, I got an error message saying the I needed to have DirectX 9.0c, and should update my graphic drivers. Finding this a bit weird, since I knew I already had to had DirextX 9.0c to run a lot of things I use, and since I'd just updated my drivers not even 12 hours earlier, I tried to update them again, just in case. But, there was no update at all, so I rolled it back and restarted my PC before opening WoW...

Now, it's working, I think. I've only played for about 45 minutes and so far everything is working just fine, but I don't think I'll really know until I try to play for an hour or two, since the game ran fine for at least half an hour to an hour each time before it crashed.
What I'm kinda confused about is my drivers. Did they somehow get rolled back without me noticing, is that even possible? Or is my PC just too old and not working as well as it should be? Did LoTRO do some serious damage to my video card, or was it just some weird mistake?

In any case, Nate said he might send me his old video card, which is a nice upgrade from my current one, so maybe that will help. It's a pity though, LoTRO was so fun, even though I only got to level 7. but I had a lute! I mean, even WoW doesn't have musical instruments that you can actually play yourself. I was so excited...booo.