Comment 8 for bug 759103

Many bugs have been refried as a duplicate of this bug,

Helping people on this support forum sticky:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10740083#post10740083
We;ve found that most of the time where they would need to use acpi=off or noacpi to get graphics to work, that it did cause other acpi related problems.

We further found that if they manually set the GRUB_GFXMODE=[WIDTHxHEIGTH|xDEPTH] in /etc/default/grub and further added a vesa vga mode set to the kernel boot line via vga=xxx, where xxx is a supported vesa mode by their hardware, that they no longer needed the acpi=off kernel mode set switch... and "everything" started working correctly again.

These all seemed to be related to this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-settings/+bug/781445
Which ties into this upstream bug: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?33318

What seems to be happening with all these interrelated problems is that If we manually set the parameters that grub should query and pass on... Then things work.

If not and set to the defaults of "auto" which spawns some processes to find and pass data to the kernel, then something is broke in those early processes and is passing invalid data.

Unfortunatley, this all means that the problem is upstream in that last referred bug.