Hi everybody, This my attempt to contribute some information for people who are struggling with the NVIDIA 4496 driver (like I have been doing for many weeks). THE PROBLEM : After installation of the new NVIDIA 4496 driver on my system (with an Nvidia GeForce4 488Go card), I only got a black screen when starting X. This could be solved by setting Option "NvAGP" "0" in the Device section of XF86Config, but ....... it was not possible anymore to go to a console with CTRL-ALT-F1 .... F6. When doing that, I only got a strange garbled multicolor screen without the system reacting to anything. It was only possible to go back to X again (with CTRL-ALT-F7). The same garbled screen was shown when shutting down the system. THE SOLUTION : After having tried in vain many things as suggested by helpful people in this discussion group, I followed the one and only useful advice (from Basil Chupin) : Throw away the 4496 driver !!!!! And install the older 4363 driver. After having done so everything worked perfect (without having changed anything else on my system), so the 4496 driver really must be incorrect. Now I could also set Option "NvAGP" "1" and all still works well. For those who want to know, here's what I did to move back to the 4363 : 1. Download the 4363 driver from www.nvidia.com 2. Goto runlevel 3 (or restart in Safe Mode) 3. Do the following : nvidia-installer --uninstall (to remove the 4496) cd /usr/src/linux make cloneconfig && make dep cd << your download directory >> sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4363.run 4. Goto runlevel 5 And .... you will be happy again. Cheers, -- Jan Elders Nuenen the Netherlands