Comment 2 for bug 1037610

I can't say much about the nvidia driver crashes, so this doesn't directly address your question, but let me ask -

Have you tried running the open source nouveau driver, rather than nvidia's? It has improved a lot, recently. I am not running a machine with an nvidia card, right now, and I'm running Quantal anyway, so I'm not sure how the version in 12.04 compares to the current releases of the xorg nouveau server, and the driver in the kernel.

Running the xorg-edgers ppa:

  https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

might not be the smoothest long-term solution, but it might give you an idea whether nouveau can serve your needs. Thanks.