X totally broken on 10.04 install & upgrade

[Howard Close]

Binary package hint: nvidia-settings

When attempting to do new install of 10.04 or an upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04, X is broken. The display is just a series of black and white lines. My video card is nVidia GeForce2 MX / MX400. Had no problems whatsoever with previous OS's. If I boot into recovery mode and attempt to run failsafe xconfig I just get a black screen.
I have partially resolved this by changing the xorg.config.failsafe to "vesa" rather than the default; I can then run in low res graphics mode. HOWEVER if I then download nVidias proprietrary drivers and run nvidia-config this appears to write an xorg.config file "default" and when I reboot I still have no display.
So at present after several days of downloads and meddling around in config files, I am left with the choice of booting into recovery mode and running in low res graphics or going back to 9.xx and having a working system.
Must say I am extremely disappointed with 10.04 - it feels as though I am back in my early days of Red Hat 3 when I had to learn to tweak every bit of the system. As a relatively old man now I feel that this is no longer an "out of the box" system as earlier Ubuntu releases were and is very much a retrograde step. If I had been a Windows user trying to migrate to Linux this would have put me off for life. 0/10 !!!!!