When I installed mint today from cd, I had to use the save-mode because of the nvidia card. So I was aware I had to change driver after install.

Right after install I checked these '10 thing to first do after install'.
http://itsfoss.com/things-to-do-afte...mint-16-petra/
I did these
Improve battery life
Change screensaver timing
Install RAR

Then I checked the driver manager to deal with the graphic driver. I tried all 3 in the driver manager, but with each mint crashes with this message right after login.

It asks if I want to restart, click 'yes' and it just refreshes the screen with the same message. click 'no' the message goes away but cinnamon does not work.

So I don't know if its crashing because of the driver or because of those things I changed after the install.

I googled some and this issue is all over linux forums, but I can't find a solution anywhere.

Now when I open the driver manager I don't see the 3 driver options for the nvidia card any more. So maybe I picked the driver which seems to work best.

BUt I still get that nasty error and no cinnamon (menu is top left corner).

Just install the driver by terminal. It may be called nvidia-driver or something like that.

would that uninstall the other driver?

Most likely yes. But, is it installed? Install .Issue: and paste the output here, so we can see what drivers are installed.

what does that tell you?

Basically it shows what nvidia driver you've got installed and the group of drivers available for install.
Anyway, follow these steps to determine what driver fits for your hardware.

stuck at this:
gives:

How about ?

and
nope

I downloaded the driver from nvidia http://www.nvidia.fr/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-en
and failed with the manual install as described on http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=154932

I just don't know anymore. Is there a mint cinnamon with another desktop environment, which does not need 3D from the graphics card?

What nvidia card have you got? Issue and paste the output here.

so a integrated intel graphics and a nvidia GeForce GTX 765M.

This is hybrid graphics and as such may be the source of your problem.
I have ATI/Intel, more less, similar.
AFAIK. There is bumblewee project for chips like yours. To that we'll come back later. Now. Let's try to understand what driver your X server is using now.

I had the same problem so I have followed the above step by step.
lshw -C video
*-display UNCLAIMED
description: VGA compatible controller
product: VirtualBox Graphics Adapter
vendor: InnoTek Systemberatung GmbH
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:02.0
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: vga_controller bus_master
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:e0000000-e7ffffff

grep nvidia /var/log/Xorg.0.log gives
[ 15.904] (II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
[ 15.905] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.so
[ 15.917] (II) Module nvidia: vendor="NVIDIA Corporation"
[ 15.935] (II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
[ 15.935] (II) Unloading nvidia

Still does not tell me how to resurrect the Cinnamon desktop and get out of Fallback Mode!!

I just had the problem appear when I did an 'update' of Mint 16.

In my case, switching to root brought up everything correctly, so I knew that
it wasn't a driver problem... just something in my personal configuration.
After a bit of searching, the following sequence worked great for me:

(1) rm -rf .local/share/cinnamon
(2) rm -rf .cinammon
(3) reboot

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