I have tested every version of Ubuntu from alpha with never a problem until
now.

You don't get the problem. It is not the driver. It is Plymouth. It uses
KMS and that does not work with Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Period. Nvidia
has been working on this problem since Fedora 11 and still no light at the
end of the tunnel. This has been a problem with Fedora users. You can work
around it, but it is a major headache. So far I am not impressed. I have
used both Fedora 12 and Lucid Lynx and my graphics card has not a had a
problem with any distribution and I test dozens except for these two. Both
use the same graphical boot loader (Plymouth). That is the common
denominator.

The only distribution that I have used that uses Plymouth that worked out of
the box with my Nvidia card is Mandriva 2010. Do a Google search and you
will find that Nvidia users who use Fedora are unhappy and that is going to
spread to Ubuntu if they don't improve things.

I am not giving up, but I am frustrated. Lucid Lynx won't boot into GUI and
Fedora is stuck in 2D. It is the same problem. I never had a single problem
with usplash (the old graphical bootloader) and I have been using Ubuntu
since early 2006.