Sorry to hear about your troubles... You have my sympathy. Can't help much, though, I'm afraid, since I'm running really old hw, and I wasn't even aware of the bug you mentioned.

I agree with your statement that Nvidia has much better Linux support than ATI.
Can you run *TW on Linux though ? I thought the main reason for buying the card was so you can play the TW games in a reasonable manner - do they all run under Linux ?

I'm sure you've spent a lot of your time looking online, are there no card settings that you can further tweak (similar to the fast writes) ?
Silly question perhaps, but what about much older drivers ?

I'll look around online, although I'm sure you've already done a much thorough job with that, if you've spent so much time on it already.