Comment 20 for bug 1273652

I also see this problem with Lubuntu 14.10 x86-64, a clean install. nvidia-settings version 331 is broken when used with version 304 of the Nvidia binary driver (nvidia-304).

Running nvidia-settings, changing refresh rate and clicking Apply causes nvidia-settings to crash with this console output:

The program 'nvidia-settings' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)'.
  (Details: serial 655 error_code 2 request_code 158 minor_code 25)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

My laptop has an Nvidia Geforce Go 7300. Version 304 of the driver is the last which works with Geforce 7000-series GPUs. I installed the Nvidia binary driver using Additional Drivers. That installs version 304 of the driver and version 331 of nvidia-settings.

There are packages called (for example) nvidia-settings-304 in the repository, but they just cause v331 to be installed.

I previously used Lubuntu 12.04, and there I was able to downgrade to nvidia-settings 304 (using Package->Force Version... in Synaptic) which works correctly, but that's not possible with 14.10.

Presumably this is an upstream (Nvidia) bug/incompatibility. However as a workaround, here are some suggested fixes which should be quite easy for the Ubuntu side:
 - Add nvidia-settings-304 real package to the 14.10 repository. Then the user can manually force that version.
 - Make nvidia-304 recommend nvidia-settings-304 and conflict with nvidia-settings-331.