No worries-

I have piles of NV, ATI and 3dfx boards (and some S3, Matrox, Intel and a few really off brands) l so have lots of time in installing and benching

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Uhm that's incorrect. As I've said in my first post in this thread,
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The best drivers for Radeon cards 9/x series are in Catalyst 5.6 release and not in Catalyst 6.5 release that also have caused me some problems Sadly Ati men have deleted all relases before Catalyst 6.x

Here you can find the right release for win2k with mighty control panel 8)
http://www.hwupgrade.it/software_dl2.php?id=2329&url=1&t=MTE4NDg0NjQ4OQ==

Hmmm..

I don't want to bring the old discussion in this thread up, but I must admit: ATI has no sense for drivers or customer support either !

Two weeks ago I had the option to buy two 3870 cards for a very interesting price  before that I used a single 8800GTS640, as gary said NV cards are really easy to use: Put it in, install the driver and enjoy your new piece of hardware..... but hell, not that thing with ATI 
I don't want to discuss the whole thing, I just want to reduce the pressure in my head created by these cards, if someone have a problem with that, don't read any further than this point !

Before I bought the cards, I was looking for some crossfire benchmarks, cause a single 3870 made no sense cause it's not even faster than my old 8800. Good, after some readings I must say for that price it would be interesting to see how this cards will perform, so i bought them. My system was already up to date to be a good home for the cards (X38 Mobo with 2xPCI-E 2.0 @16-Lanes each).
But the first thing I was worried about was the question about the internal crossfire bridges: Do I have to use only one or both of the bridges  ??? At this point, there is no clear instruction in one of the manuals or a usefull hint either... so it tested both configurations with benchmarks, cause there isn't any difference there are now both connectors in use 
At this point I'm going a bit away from my machine and need to talk about another ATI thing thats really goint to bring my head to boil.... the ATI support. Yes there is a ATI Forum, but it is the most useless support thing i've ever seen from such a big company than ATI is. Why ? It doesn't matter what you ask or write in there, you never will get any support from an ATI technican, cause there isn't a support around there 
So back to my system: Cards are in, NV driver uninstalled and I'm going to install the ATI Catalyst 7.11 Drivers, everythings fine besides two reboots I have to do... but what the hell happened to my multi monitor configuration ? First problem: If you're going to enable CF the cards are just able to drive one monitor, cause this is a technical restriction which is clearly described in the manual at this point its my fault. So every time i want to use both screens I have to disable CF.... fine.
So make the best of this situation: CCC provides a profile manager, so the easiest way (and the one ATI tells you in the CCC help is the best) is to use two different profiles:
- CF disabled with both screens
- CF enabled with one screen
but hey ? it isn't working  everytime I'm switching to CF enable it kills the configuration for the second screen out of all profiles, and then CF isn't yet available until i reboot the machine.... if I'm doing all the steps manually it works but not over the profile manager....DAMN  and whats that ? the driver isn't able to drive my second screen in the way i want it: resolution and the normal things are all ok and running, but why isn't the driver just like the NV one able to stretch the background picture correctly for the different resolutions of my screens ? It's a small problem, but IT SUCKS !
So ok, Desktop up and running with some restrictions 

But what about the gaming performance ?
Ok going to start Crysis: HELL WHAT'S THAT ? Everything is flickering, there are some missing textures and the water is wobbling like a drunken bastard, never seen this effects on my 8800  AH OK, there's a fixed driver around, just like the one i've already installed it is called "Catalyst 7.11" bit confused about that i tryied to install it.... hmmm situation is still the same.... ok another approach, kill all the ati drivers and apps and reinstall the fixed driver again. ok situation is better but still not as good as with an NV driver.... but crysis isn't the only one game i want to play... let's go and play CoD4 (really like that game !), but hey there's no performance gain if I enable/disable CF... hmmmm is the second card really up and running ? Don't know yet cause there isn't something in the driver which shows you which card is at which load in use.... GPU-Z has still some problems detecting an active CF configuration.... so i tested with HL2EP2 and the second card seems to be up and running due to a 80% peformance gain in source engine based games.... good.

so here I am now... got a running 3870 CF setup which runs almost ok (not fine, but ok) in most of the games.
I have some restrictions using my desktop for work due to technical restrictions and malfunctions in the driver.... i can live with that for the moment but I'm trying to fix that by using an additional graphics adapter..... don't know if this would work because I'm still not having an answer from the ATI support 
What about the future ? Yesterday the Catalyst 7.12 came out..... i just read the release notes and I must say "WHAT THE crappity smack IS ATI DOING FOR THE LAST MONTHS ???" there are NO performance improvements, not a single one of the known heavy issues are fixed and no support for actual games either..... sry this is really annoying ! 

I'm sry but AMD/ATI isn't in a good position this moment. AMD is loosing customers due to delays and (performance-)problems with the phenom. ATI is going to fall back ways behind NV just because the drivers and support is so bad (and it really is kind of horrible)....
Sometimes I'm just thinking "Why aren't you going for a NV card ?", norries I'm not going to sell my 3870 in the next time, cause I just have a little hope that things become better in Spring when ATI will release some brand new driver models..... but is this really coming up ? are my problems solved ? I don't know but this experience leaves a bad taste in my mind......

ok I'm ending now... thanks that I can bring down this boring story here and thanks for your tolerance (also because my english is bad as hell )

edit: WTF ? this is all i received on my support ticket:
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NOT THAT WAY !!! I just reopened the ticket with some nice additonal comment 

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Which is rather odd since Win2000 and XP are more or less the same core.

Credit where credit is due- Nvidia still supports* Win9x up to the 7 series** G-force boards.

* Your milage may vary.

** 6 series via the Nvidia portal, 7 series via official partner site if you know where to look!

For those of you using nVidia cards - there are NEW OMEGA drivers released for them as well (very recently!)

7.12 - tried what you said and it works fine for me...

However the x1950pro agp are known to have issues...

the witcher wikia weirdness is fixed with 8.1