New Ubuntu user - just recently made the mistake of trying a different nvidia driver. I'd managed to get the last (nvidia-current) one working through software sources a few weeks ago. The other day I tried to cross over to nvidia-experimental-310 and this produced a system error. Swapping back and forth between proprietary drivers now always causes an error and I can't get any of them to work.

Installing through the terminal I get this error message every time:

Building initial module for 3.5.0-19-generic
Error! Bad return status for module build on kernel: 3.5.0-19-generic (x86_64)
Consult /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-experimental-310/310.14/build/make.log for more information

On rebooting, I end up with the crappy screen resolution and the thick black border around the screen. I use gksudo software-properties-gtk to bring up sources, where I can change back to the nouveau driver, which restores my screen. After that I can't find /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-experimental-310/310.14/build/make.log so I can't tell you what's inside.

Any ideas what might be preventing the nvidia driver from installing?

SOLUTION FOUND Okay - so I have a workaround. This is what has worked:

1. Upgrade to kernel 3.7.0 as detailed here
2. upgrade to latest version of the nvidia drivers as detailed here

No idea what was happening with kernel 3.5.0-19, but this seems to be better. A little slower maybe on boot, but after days of messing around it's nice to have something that works.