SoftICE crashes with NVIDIA 81.x/82.x drivers

As some of you know, 3DMark06 was released yesterday. Since I wanted to get the best possible score my PC can get, I downloaded and installed the latest NVIDIA drivers and run the benchmark.

Today I tried to run SoftICE, but as soon as I started it, my computer locked up. I first guessed that some copy protection was using a new trick, but I soon figured out that the new NVIDIA drivers are the problem.

No matter if I selected "manual", "automatic" or "system" for SoftICE startup, my PC always became locked. When I selected "boot" as start method, SoftICE started like normal, but as soon as I tried to open the SoftICE window in Windows, my PC was frozen again.

Then I downloaded all recent drivers I could get from NVIDIA, namely:
71.84 BETA
77.72 WHQL
77.77 WHQL
78.01 WHQL
81.85 WHQL
81.94 BETA
81.95 WHQL
81.98 WHQL
82.12 BETA

I installed each version and found out that with all "ForceWare" drivers (81.x and 82.x) made SoftICE lock the computer as soon as the SoftICE window should show up. The older drivers worked all without problems.

The main difference I noticed between the old and the new drivers is that you don't need to reboot your PC any more in order to enable or disable the "SLI" feature.

I did some tests and it turned out that if you turn "SLI" either on or off before starting SoftICE, SoftICE will load without any problems.

Does anybody have the same problem or even knows how to fix it?

(I guess the problem is SLI specific, so please don't post a "works fine for me" if you don't have a "NVIDIA nForce4 SLI" chipset with two graphic cards running in SLI mode)

Edit:
I'm running Windows XP and I already did a clean installation with nothing else than WinXP, chipset, network and video drivers installed. So the problem is not related to any old registry entries or any copy protection.