Okay.

Sorry to hear about your troubles. I'm using a video card with a chipset for which the OpenGL support has a reputation of being often somewhat inferior to the card you seem to be using, but I've seen no crashes and pretty much stellar performance so far.

I guess you never know ...

Give Adobe a chance. But if they don't come through on support or are too slow, you might try asking around to see if someone can loan you a different high quality video card just to see if yours may be the main cause of the problems you're seeing.

As for my "spring-loaded" comment, tools can be temporarily switched to by pressing and holding the shortcut tool, i.e., you can be, say, zoomed up in the image and in the middle of some brush work and can press and hold the 'H' key and click on the image with the hand tool (keeping the left button down) and it will zoom out to a bird's eye view of the image, and you can then select a different portion of the image and then release the 'H' key and continue with your brush work, i.e., whatever tool you were in the middle of using will again be active, whether it is the dodge tool, burn tool, clone stamp, etc..

You can do it with the rotate tool, too, i.e., while in the middle of another task, you can press and hold the 'R' key, rotate the image on the fly, and then release the 'R' key and proceed with whatever task you were in the middle of. It's very cool, and should prove to be a productivity enhancer for those willing to learn these shortcut keys. My only complaint with it is you can't do it with the any of the selection tools active, i.e., it would be nice to be able to rotate the image in the MIDDLE of making a selection. Still, one should be able to get similar results simply by doing a partial selection and then rotating and then adding to the previous selection. Still, the other way would be very much cooler.

You should be able to operate similarly with some of the other tools, like the move tool, the eyedropper tool, etc., but I haven't experimented with much besides 'H' and 'R' yet.