Comment 2 for bug 544813

Alberto Milone has helped me understand what is going on. It seems the wrong libGL is being loaded because I activated the nvidia driver but did not disable it before bringing my drive to the computer with the Intel chipset. I am still not sure why this would only affect gnome-session and not affect GDM. It seems that X will not automatically deactivate the nvidia driver when I boot my drive in my machine with the Intel 945GME Chipset. The expected behavior is that X will automatically detect that it is not the same chipset and change the to the correct libGL alternative for that particular chipset.

There are two ways to correct this issue if you are experiencing the same thing:

1) Boot the drive in the computer with the nvidia card and disable the nvidia driver in jockey-gtk (Hardware Drivers)

2) On the computer which flips the screen. Run the following command from a TTY

$ sudo update-alternatives --config gl_conf
#Asks which alternative to select:
#0 /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf 9700 auto mode
#1 /usr/lib/mesa/ld.so.conf 9700 manual mode
#2 /usr/lib/nvidia-current/ld.so.conf 9700 manual mode
#Chose MESA (option 2)

$ sudo ldconfig
$ sudo update-initramfs -u
$ sudo reboot