:-)
You have hit the nVIDIA Driver Brickwall Syndrome.
Even the very latest driver (5336), which is supposed to have fixed all sorts of problems, causes you to hit the Brickwall.
Tell us (me) which video card you are using and which version of the kernel (Athlon or non-Athlon)?
Depending on your answer, you may have to go back to the #4363 driver (you would uninstall the driver you just installed with 'nvidia-installer --uninstall' and then install the #4363 driver.
(What I concluded is that any driver after #4363 does not like something in the combination of the Athlon CPU and (?) any card below, say, FX5200 (eg MX 400, 440. This is a broad statement and is not meant to be authorative.)
Cheers.
Athlon 3200+ Gigabyte GA7n400 Pro2 nVidia GeForce MX 550 Linux 2.4.21-166-athlon #1 Kind of a bummer if true. Any plans to fix?