Well. As hard as it may be to believe, the long overdue fix appears to finally be here.
I browsed over to the NV forums earlier to see if anything came up yet to fix this and found a post about the 177 drivers. Which some may recall were claimed to have the illusive fix to this. I tried them out and can confirm that they do seem to fix the stutter. The few maps i tested, which were heavily prone to stuttering like mad, are smooth as silk now.
Too bad this didn't come before the game got dead-er, though.
Ohh, yeeessss !!!!
I still have to install UT2004 in my new PC with the 8800, but that's a relief !