I upgraded to Hardy from Gutsy this evening using the update manager. Gutsy worked with my nvidia 8500gt perfectly. Compiz ran smooth, all was well. Initially after the upgrade everything appeared normal, it rebooted after the upgrade to my standard 1280 x 1024 resolution and everything seemed fine, window animations were behaving as normal, desktop cube worked, everything. I went in to the advanced desktop effects menu to check out some of the new plugins like 3D windows. I tried to enable 3D windows but the checkbox was grayed out. I went to appearance>visual effects and noticed that none of the 3 options were checked. I tried to check "normal" and the screen flashed for a sec and then told me that "Desktop effects could not be enabled". I checked my restricted drivers and verified that it was installed and in use. After a little forum cruising here I decided to download the newest beta drive from nvidia and install it. No change. Then I read about EnvyNG. Installed and ran Envy, and it completely broke everything. Was forced to boot into 640x480. After a liitle more forum hunting I managed to re-install the newest beta driver (173.08 ) now I have my 1280x1024 resolution back but still can't enable advanced desktop effects. Also when I check restricted drivers in System>Administration>Hardware drivers nothing is listed.
I am running the most current kernel on Hardy 64 bit. Card is a NVIDIA Geforce 8500GT. Please help!!