Comment 1 for bug 505560

Yeah, the X driver system in debian/ubuntu for proprietary drivers was designed with an assumption that the system has just one video device. So it did not cope well with swapping to other drivers or changing hardware out from underneath or whatnot.

This has become particularly a problem on the newer hybrid computers that include multiple graphics cards and hardware or bios toggles to swap between them, but it's a deep design issue that requires rearchitecting the whole system in order to fix.

For Lucid we have undertaken this rearchitecture work. It is difficult and fairly risky that we might end up just breaking things in other different ways but if we can make it work then hopefully it will solve this whole problem.

Anyway, since i think that rework will address this request, I'll dupe this to the master bug for that work. Your help doing thorough testing of this in Lucid would be valuable. See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Testing/ for a link to the proprietary drivers testing checklist.