I formatted my whole hard drive, and installed Elementary OS (Ubuntu 10.10) on it in an attempt to get rid of all the problems. It failed.

Every since I installed the nvidia-current drivers I first need to boot into recovery mode, and run sudo nvidia-xconfig before booting the system in the normal way.
If I don't do this, it will just stop at a black screen after the boot screen, responding to nothing but CTRL+ALT+DELETE and the power button.

When I boot the system after running the nvidia-xconfig command I can just start working as usual.

Update

I suspect it's got something to do with Plymouth. I shall have to try it again before I can confirm it, but removing the quiet and splash parameters from the kernel line in /boot/grub/grub.cfg seems to help.
But still, I like my Plymouth screen. A black screen with text rolling over it (or without the text) doesn't attract me much.