Comment 18 for bug 286424

Per Eric Julien's suggestion (thanks Eric!) I added the ServerLayout section to xorg.conf and it seemed to fix my problem. Running nvidia-settings as root was still necessary.

It seems that having an (empty) ServerLayout section in xorg.conf by default, and requiring nvidia-settings to run as root, would fix the vast majority of the problems.

I find it interesting that nvidia is still using xorg.conf for configuration, while ATI has already moved to the new style and has ceased to use it for config settings.