When I first read your posts I was under the impression that you were trying to get the 9.3 drivers to work in Ubuntu 8.10. Are you using Debian instead?

I'm curious because I've got the exact same problem with the 9.3 drivers making my login and desktop completely scrambled in Ubuntu 8.10. I'm pretty sure I removed the old drivers completely and installed it right, so I can't really see why it's not working. But if your problem was initially in Debian and you got it to work in ubuntu, I'd like to know how you did that.
I'm not about to give up as I got the drivers to work perfectly (even world of warcraft ran like a dream) in 8.04, and I know people have gotten it to work in 8.10 as well, so why shouldn't I? Luckily I agree that this is great fun. Being a noob the OS holds much fascination. :P

In case you're still struggling with this, and in case someone might be able to help me, here's what I found.

I've still got 8.04 on a different partition, so I went there and opened the xorg.conf from 8.10 to change the driver back to "vesa", hoping that would fix the scrambled graphics and let me log in. Only the driver was already set to "vesa". (And yes, I'm sure this was the right xorg.conf, the one belonging to 8.04 already has the 9.3 driver working perfectly).
So, I went to /usr/src/modules and deleted the fglrx folder, restarted the comp and voila.... nothing changed.

This leaves me a bit puzzled as I figured what I just did should have removed the driver. And the only time I ever got those scrambled graphics was after the two times I tried installing the ATI 9.3 drivers and restarted. So if it's not the driver, what is it? Or if it is the driver, what more can I do to get rid of it?

are you getting any video at all? if so what driver are you using at the moment?
cheers,
jdk

I was using the Catalyst 9.3 on both Hardy and Intrepid, but it only worked on Hardy.

Anyway, I found a new way to fix it. Install Jaunty.

I used your method and it worked, it started the installation in the terminal, but it gave me an error and stopped.

Error: ./default_policy.sh does not support version
default:v2:i686:lib::none:2.6.28-11-generic; make sure that the version is being
correctly set by --iscurrentdistro