Comment 147 for bug 1268257

The Ubuntu package is mostly just a drop-in of the official Nvidia packages for Linux:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

So yes, this is actually an Nvidia upstream problem.

I suspect that there is some sort of race condition in the provided build scripts written by Nvidia, and they are only showing up intermittently or under particular system configurations/states, so package reinstallation tends to work fine the second time.

Related: I see this comment in Nvidia's Makefile regarding the "new" build system in Linux >= 2.6:

# The new approach currently has its own share of problems, some of which
# are architectural difficulties with KBUILD, others minor annoyances. For
# this reason, an improved version of the NVIDIA Makefile is available to
# those experiencing difficulties.

So it sounds like they admit to having architectural difficulties here. I wonder where this "improved version" of the Makefile can be obtained...