Comment 57 for bug 745996

I ran into this one as well with oneiric live cd (i386) on my old desktop running nvidia gf fx5600.

The live cd installer loads and looks ok but after chosing to test ubuntu from cd instead, unity loads and everything goes haywire. Only the top right indicators, window title on the top left and the sidebar shadow are visible. If I hover over the (what should be) sidebar launchers their titles are displayed with a tooltip. Windows and controls are there, cand be interacted with but are invisible. Installer is unusable as well.

Both Ubuntu and Ubuntu 2D sessions affected. No .drirc in sight (again, it's the official live cd)

If you choose to install right away instead, all goes well. Since I chose to install updates and 3rd party software, nvidia-96 was installed and the problem disappeared at first boot. Changing to nvidia-173-updates introduced no problems as far as I can tell.