It seems that I'm not alone. That's the good news. The bad one is no one seems to know why some Nova-S cards fail. Is your card the same as mine (<http://www.jucs-kramkiste.de/claas/novas.png>) ?same story here. I have one Nova-S (about 1 year old). All recordings I made with my other two cards DVB-S (1.3 and 2.1) are o.k., only problems with the Nova-card. The last test I made was a system with SuSE 7.3 prof. Kernel 2.4.22 (vanilla) and DVB driver release 1.0.1. No change. Then I orderd 2 new Nova-S (from the same dealer) and the same problems as you described. :-(
I will try to install linvdr 0.3 (I can't download the pre4 version you mentioned) later these day or tonight. I wonder why linvdr work with the same driver than you used before.BUT, now it works till some weeks ago with linvdr 0.3 (pre4) from www.linvdr.org. Sometimes I had the problems again, but it was now o.k. for all day use. (With all three Nova-Cards / C433 / ASUS P2BS). Linvdr 0.3 uses DVB-driver 1.0.1, too, based on debian woody.