ATI or NVidia/AMD (Not what you think ;-)

I have seen a lot of people complaining about how esp ATI graphics cards have problems with SL, but as I have been trying to fix a friends computer (freezes and crashes) who has an ATI, I have come across some interesting findings.

Firstly, we both have similar systems, AMD CPU and ATI Radeon 9600, with both of us running Omega drivers (one of my only choices as I have a laptop).
My system runs everything fine, it is a little slower than hers, I only have 512meg memory, 64meg (dedicated) video, whereas she has 1gig, and 256meg video (and faster harddrives). I have an ASUS laptop, and she has a desktop with a NVidia nforce3 motherboard. Our system software is very similar.

The problem comes esp. with some games (not as much SL, luckily), that my system will run it without problem, whereas hers has small pauses in game and pause freezes for 10 secs and then continues (with every so often a full crash) , but as I said SL has not been effected yet (cross fingers).

OK, that is the setup out of the way.

I have been doing a lot of reading to try to fix the problem, and something just keeps popping up . I keep on seeing mention of NVidia nforce motherboards with often both AMD processors and ATI graphics cards, but a few with just mention of NVidia graphics cards.
One thing is for sure, the drivers (at least for the nforce3), are a problem, the latest (5.11) crash with the ethernet driver (installing/uninstalling), and it has not been fixed for some time.

Now I would like to ask those of you who have problems with crashes or freezes, how many of you are using the combination of either an ATI video card with an NVidia nforce motherboard, or an AMD processor with an nforce motherboard, or some other combination with nforce?