Well, I installed the detonator drivers on my system (P41.9 running Mandrake 9.0 dual booting with WinXP) and anything grpahically demandng just doesn't seem to run. I have plenty of files here which may be of assistance (apologies for their location but it's the best I can do on such short notice)

http://uk.geocities.com/mechstorm/linux/

• XF86Config-4.txt - A copy of my current X config
• XFree86.0.log - My most recent log
• check.txt - The output of the Nvidia checker fornm the Hardware forum
• chooser.txt - The output of the Nvidia file selector
• dev.txt - the contents of my /dev directory
• xdpy.txt - The output of xdpyconfig

Now, the checker tells me to do something, but I have no idea what was going on, the only messages I got during installation that may have been errors were some telling me that it was putting some files it didn't recognise into sotrage.

Can anyone help?

You forgot to write how does it look from your point of view. Are you able to start X correctly? What does it mean 'anything grpahically demandng just doesn't seem to run'? Do the program start and crash or don't crash at all?

One of the crript suggests to create /dev/nvidia1 file. You don't have it, you have /dev/nvidia0. Try to create it:
mknod /dev/nvidia1 c 195 1
(I'm not sure if you need c, so first check: 'ls -l /dev/nvidia0' and see if the first character in the line is c or b, it should be c).

My apologies, as far as I can tell it's GL applications that fall over, X itself starts without batting an eyelid. I shall try what you recommend.

Ok, did that, then it asked to create a nvidia2 (which I did) then an nvidia3 (which I did). The nv_check script now runs all the way through without finiding any problems, but things like Uplink and Tuxracer still won't run.

Ok, I've got it sorted now, I used the NVIDIA installer, first time I copuldn't restart X, so I ran the installer again and it worked....