After chasing around an unfortunate bug wherein my Dell's Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 requires a driver other than either nouveau or nvidia-current, I came across this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-173/+bug/948053
Trouble is I'm not certain how to proceed from here - and I'm also really, really cautious about doing this, because the last two or three times I tried to install drivers for this card I ended up with bad resolution and/or a blank screen, and I did end up reinstalling Ubuntu at least once.
I'm fairly positive that there's no error with the card as it worked under Windows XP on the same machine not a month ago, so I believe the error was human. :/ What's the best way to install based on the information in the link above, and if it goes belly up, what's the right way to reverse it? I'm not terribly excited to reinstall again :) Thanks.