I'm a Radeon 9700 owner and I must say I'm very impressed with the card itself and the drivers from Ati. I'm a former Nvidia user and I was nervous about making the switch but so far I have had no stability problems with my 9700 and WinXP.
I have not experienced a single BSOD, CTD, random reboot, or any lockup since purchasing a 9700. The drivers I'm using (6193) are rock solid.
However, the one snag I've noticed so far is that anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering don't work with either of the Combat Mission games. Both AA and AF work perfectly with all of my other games that I threw at it except for CMBO and CMBB. Go figure :confused:
Despite that minor problem I highly recommend the card. It hauls ass!