The last three days my pc has frozen at least four times. Here is exactly what happens. For some reason my screen freezes. This is more probable when CPU usage is near 100% although it happens even when it is not. These are the symptoms.
1. The screen (or a part of it freezes).
2. If I am in X I can move the mouse pointer (although it moves abnormally) but no action can be done.
3. When pressing the power button the system goes down after a while. No messages are shown and the screen remains frozen but it does power down normally. When I boot again I don't get any messages about an unclean filesystem so I suppose it has shut down properly.
4. The kernel logs say something like: "module nvidia taints kernel" What is it supposed to mean?
5. My keyboard stops working. Period.

To tell you the truth I am frustrated. Yesterday I booted and before I entered X I tried to configure some mysql stuff. While I wasn't doing anything cpu intensive my display did something quite unusual. Parts of lines (like half-lines) stayed statically there even when changing tty. After a while I suffered another lock-up and had to reboot. BTW after adding mysql in the init scripts things seem to have gotten worse. I have used this kernel and a nearly identical to this one for weeks before installing nvidia drivers with no problems at all. Everything seems to be going wrong because of these drivers.

My uptimes are a shame to the UNIX world. Am I punished for not using free software?
What can I do? Are there any decent free drivers for nvidia GPUs? (something with a good performance).

Remove your installation of the nvidia driver. If you don't game on this machine, using the default open source nv driver should work without any issues. If you do game, try recompiling your kernel and then try reinstalling the nvidia drivers.

Don't judge Unix on one little problem your having. It's a drivers issue, not an OS issue that is causing all this grief for you. Blame nvidia for the crappy driver your most likely using and just installed and get on with your life.

I know it's a driver issue. I've seen UNIX-based PUBLIC computers that make uptimes > 20 days. That's why I feel my box is a shame to the UNIX world. I got the NVIDIA drivers in the first place because they are supposed to make video playback less CPU intensive (MPlayer documentation). BTW is there "linux-friendly" graphics accelerator out there with free drivers that support 3d and everything?

Only problems I've had with nvidia or ati cards with any distro I've tried including xp is when its been agp and bios setting for fast mode agp - screen freeze etc.. Maybe something that simple with any luck if you have an agp card. Nvidia taints kernel always seems to appear but doesnt do any harm as far as Ive found.

Disable fast writes from the bios.

hes right fast write was the problem on my box... but i still had some problems so i scrapped the nvidia

is there a way to presure companies onto making good drivers for us linux folk... its the same with allot of other hardware not just video.

maybe a bomb