I have an old GeForce FX5200 card on an old K6-III 450 system. My processor does not accept the SSE instruction set used in the 173.14.12 driver. I have been patiently waiting for the new 173.14.15 driver since it no longer requires the SSE instruction set. Does anyone know when this will be made available under envyng in Ubuntu 8.10......

I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing it'll be included in the next release of Ubuntu.

I'm hoping they backport it to 8.10......

IIRC when you go directly to the NVIDIA site, they offer "legacy" drivers for their cards, maybe try one of them?

Maybe the package-manager for 8.10 can't be bothered, but you are likely to have more success by going directly to NVIDIA's site and trying some "legacy" drivers.
If not then you'll have to backtrack your kernel / distro to something older to run on that hardware.

I have some seriously OLD hardware (?2001, PIII 1GHz anyone?), but I have managed to find an NVIDIA driver that'll compile for me. I'm still running kubuntu 6.06.1 on that PC and it has the functionality I need, although it is not exactly "elegant" or "pretty" by today's standards it still works, faultlessly. I'd tell you more about the hardware, but it's three floors up, and will NOT wake-on-LAN and I'm tired. Ask if you need more info.
HTH

Right now I am running the 96.43.09 driver which is made for the GeForce 4 series cards. I am hoping that once the 173.14.15 driver is available my Geforce FX5200 board will run a bit more stable. With the 96.43.09 driver I get a lot of jittering and hang ups.

I also have a Geforce FX5200 card and I installed the nvidia legecy driver version 173.14.12-2 via the pacman manager. Not sure if it's using the SSE instruction set, but this version is working great with my card.