I agree with Smilely and the others here. This sounds like your system is a bit overloaded when it gets into driver.
Post your system specs here, and we'll see what we can do.
This may appear to be a graphics-related problem but it may not all be the graphics. In general I have found that sometimes a BIOS upgrade on the motherboard and other driver changes will help with overall performance.
Remember Driver takes a lot more resources than Surveyor. In Driver, unlike Surveyor, there are scripts running to control the signals, industries, driver commands, etc.
This extra work will make your computer system work quite hard, and much harder than in Surveyor, which can put some pressure on your computer. There are things that will help with this issue and include ensuring that the system is running top-notch in the first place.
Ensure that the system drivers are up-to-date.
Ensure that the BIOS is at the latest revision as possible.
Check the technical forums for your system. Sometimes the latest and greatest isn't so great. The same goes for the video cards too.
Ensure your RAM is working properly. I've posted numerous times regarding weird memory problems. If your RAM is faulty, it may or may not cause an error. You can check your RAM with various utilities. Among them is memtest86.
How's the disk space on your hard drive(s). A computer with low space will constantly thrash about and suffer from major performance issues. Defrag your drive too. This will help tremendously.
Power and heat can really wreak havoc on a system, particularly during the summer months. If your system gets warm, it'll slow down before it crashes. This is a saftey feature to keep the hardware from burning up. Intel I know has this feature built into it's CPUs, and NVidia-branded video card manufactures I know build this into their video cards. If they get hot, they will slow down and bottleneck performance. So check your fans, and add fans if necessary to cool down the system. If they are dirty, take a pencil and put it between the blades and blow out the fans individually with canned air.
You power supply... As I mentioned briefly can cause poor performance. Ensure that the power is good going into it and out. Sometimes spending a little bit more for a better power supply is worth every penny in the end.
I could list many more things here. I hope this gives you some things to go on.
John
EDIT: It looks like we cross-posted. The hardware looks good, but I would check for latest video drivers. ATI cards tend to be problematic anyway due to various issues.