Solution and some clarifications. First of all, the nvidia drivers were working after the kernel update, they just were very slow. Second, YOU selected the nvidia update automatically, I didn't choose it myself. I'm not sure what the problem was with the speed. But the reason I wasn't being able to update is that I was using something called /usr/bin/nvidia-installer, which seems to get installed when you download the nvidia driver package and executes it for the first time, and stays there as a form of doing later updates. That's what I had been using for the last two updates, IIRC. After I couldn't make it work this time, I downloaded the new drivers manually (the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run file) directly from nvidia. That did work (after recompiling the drivers). Checking /usr/bin shows me that it also installed a new nvidia-installer app. Now I'm back to decent speeds and back to nwn (just in time too, today I got Shadows of Undrentide from tux games :) So, there you go. If you're having problems with nvidia and the new kernel, don't trust YOU or your existing nvidia-installer. Download the whole thing from nvidia. Thanks to those who tried to help. Adalberto