FTR and for anyone who comes across this with a similar issue... after working w/ the guys at NVidia - they were able to reproduce it in the lab. They are now working on a fix. MUCH time wasted in denying the problem and/or assuming it was on the customers end BUT hats off to Josh at Nvidia for giving me the benefit of the doubt. He worked with me to confirm I did put my legwork in and wasn't crazy/ignorant (god knows they likely get MANY such cases. Anyhow its now out of my hands.

2 dozen reformats and a couple weeks later >.<