My friend is using a Toshiba Sattelite laptop with a Geforce 2 Go video card and he is having a very similar issue. He also is having problems when he tries to use a Logitech trackball with his laptop during the install (it crashes). We successfully upgraded from Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 2 by unplugging the trackball, but have not been able to get X to start successfully once. Even after installing the latest drivers and compiling the new kernel module from nvidia (5336) we have not been able to get it to work. This may be an issue related to the original poster's problem and I am hoping someone may know a fix for it by now
The error we are getting in the log file after X crashes is "Failed to initialize NVIDIA kernel module!" then some other related errors follow, but I feel this is the most important error.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Toby