I have been profiling my NEC3090 with the SpectraView software and the Eye-One Display 2 colorimeterfor almost a year now, with good results until recently. As I understand, the SpectraView software is supposed to neutralize the effect of the video card so that there are not two sets of color adjustment going at the same time.
A couple of weeks ago I found that there was a new driver for my nVidia 3900GT video cards, which I run in SLI mode to boost the hardware acceleration. Disobeying my usual rule of "don't fix it if it ain't broke," I installed the new driver, which caused crashes with everything. I immediately deinstalled it and rolled back to the old driver (I'm also running WinXPPro, SP3). I noticed that my reds were now so saturated and bright that they were leaping of the screen at me.
After several attempts at callibrating and reprofiling with SpectraView II I was unseccessful at taming the reds. I went into the nVidia panel and found under Color Settings that the Vibrance slider was set at +79. I also found that the nVidia panel icon appeared in the task-bar associated with the Start Menu. I ran MSConfig and disabled anything starting with nVxxx that was located in the nVidia folder and rebooted, and the reds seem normal to me.
I'm going to recalibrate and reprofile the monitor and see if stuff stays OK.
The question I have, for those who know nVidia, is "Am I doing something wrong by disabling the nVidia processes from the Startup tab in MSConfig?"
If not, I would suggest that those who have NEC displays and too-red reds check their startup routine to see if a similar problem exists.