I recently installed a GeForce FX 5200 on my Xubuntu 8.04 system. The card was working fine, except when I logged out -- the system would then freeze and require a hard reboot. It seemed likely to be a video driver problem, so I tried... I don't remember what. But it severely messed up video drivers on my system.

Now, I can't get the Nvidia restricted drivers to stick. The system boots into low-graphics mode and 800x600 resolution, and I can't select anything higher than that. (I usually run the system at 1600x1200.) I've tried running dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, I've tried uninstalling all the Nvidia drivers through Synaptic and then reinstalling them, I've tried manually editing the xorg.conf file (I keep plenty of backups), I've tried installing the Nvidia proprietary drivers from their website... nothing has worked. From my research, it looks like the only thing that has worked for people is upgrading to 9.04 or whatever, but that seems really extreme. Is there a solution? Please help!