Comment 6 for bug 873929

nvidia-173 is a special legacy driver, which doesn't cover your 8800M GTS card. Hence don't expect performance... Better try nouveau instead !

I have Oneiric x86_64 too and experience similar problems with my 8800M GTX, i.e. systematic X freeze shortly after startup. Logging in doesn't matter here, it freezes anyway after some time waiting at the login screen. I have the same strange /proc/driver/nvidia/params too (I don't think the value 4294967295 is anything like normal where it appears). A few system BIOS/vBIOS flashes didn't change anything.

If you dare breaking your distribution's packaging system, you could try an old version of the driver (but NOT the legacy 173 one) from nVidia's website. Eventually it used to work in the past, with older drivers, it started freezing with last summer's drivers if I remember correctly... but those older drivers had problems anyway, most notably with flash players.

I have been suspecting a buggy BIOS, especially the ACPI DSDT, since I got ACPI-related error messages. You share at least one with me :
[Firmware Bug]: ACPI: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored

Booting with acpi=off doesn't solve it though, at least for me.

Anyway, can't help thinking our problems are related. The 8800M GTS and 8800M GTX are similar, both G92M, and released the same day by nVidia... I will come back if I ever find a solution to this !