Two cards with bad video is a little too much of a coincidence in my
book so exactly how is the video 'bad' ? Have you tried with a
different monitor ( and also VGA cable ) ? How doe it look when
booting from a Live CD ?

I didnt give the proper description but yes I did try an
alternative. The Nvidia card is giving off a look like the code from the
Matrix kind of between the proper look. Im sure its going bad. It was a
Pull from a Dell that was pretty old. As for the Radeon well if Im looking
at a movie the picture is like going in freeze frame. Im going to try the
script that C Beck mentioned. Ill get back to you all in a few.

Right, here are some links and info if you hadn't found them already-

The driver installation file:
support.amd.com/.../index.aspx>
of course, this is ATI proprietary, so you are downloading a 120 MB
".run" file, of which the first several hundred lines are human
readable. The rest is the usual "blob". So I am using the term
"script" a bit loosely. :)

Installation help specific to Ubuntu are here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI>

For the manual installation, you need to modify the tail-end of your
build command. Instead of Ubuntu/oneric as in the example, that
command will need to end in Ubuntu/lucid.

One additional note for you:

Quoting from that page above: "The easiest way to install binary
drivers is to use the built in Hardware Drivers manager in Ubuntu. In
Ubuntu 10.10, this is found under System -> Administration ->
Additional Drivers." So worth it also to check that first. My system
does not have that option since it is the 10.04 server base. Checking
the repository didn't show the package even available, but I'll keep
my fingers crossed for you, as that sounds super easy.

I don't know about the nivedea... But I just went through the process of
installing the ATI Radeon driver. Step 1 was to get a driver install
script from the ati site (the open source driver in Ubuntu repository down
not work well with accelleration). This script builds 3 deb packages that
will install the driver.

Mine didn't work quite right, but I realized this morning I probably have
the "HD" card version, even though lspci does not report the hd part. I'm
trying again tonight. I can point at the site and installation instructions
when I'm back off mobile if you want...