Comment 9 for bug 877682

I don't think it's related. I don't see any reports of X crashing here, just inability to use external displays. Furthermore, the bug referenced in that changelog entry was introduced in the 295 timeframe and this bug is reported in 280.

The issue described here also doesn't seem to exactly match the issue described on the ubuntuforums.org and forums.nvidia.com links: here it sounds like neither external display is working, and on the forum posts it sounds like the control panel is freezing when enabling two external monitors simultaneously.

The latter is a known bug in the control panel which was fixed in the 290 timeframe. The former sounds like a distinct issue to me, but maybe I've misunderstood the report. It would be good to clarify with the original reporter.

For the control panel bug, you don't want to do a full driver update for that bug, you can just patch the control panel:

--- a/src/gtk+-2.x/ctkdisplayconfig-utils.c
+++ b/src/gtk+-2.x/ctkdisplayconfig-utils.c

@@ -1111,8 +1111,8 @@
     if (!screen->displays) {
         screen->displays = display;
     } else {
- nvDisplayPtr last = screen->displays;
- while (last) {
+ nvDisplayPtr last;
+ for (last = screen->displays; last; last = last->next_in_screen) {
             if (!last->next_in_screen) {
                 last->next_in_screen = display;
                 break;