Well, that was 4 days of hell

Tried 9.6, 9.4 and 9.2 drivers, still same results.

Installed a fresh XP on a.n.other hard drive, patched up the OS and installed 9.6 only to get the same results!!!

It's either bad hardware or some weird incompatibility between the 4870 and my motherboard.

However, I couldn't make it crash with other games (over an hour of Left4Dead and Fear2 and no problems but WoW would always crash).

So, have returned the card and restored from backup and replaced the old 9800GT.

Had enough of that for a while, want to play games not play "source the cause of the crash"!