I had no problems at all installing Mandrake 10.0 with the newest Nvidia drivers for my Gforce 3. Install was clean and it made a new XF86Config-4 file that I modified to get the new drivers to work.
I installed MDK 10.1 from a fresh install and used the latest Nvidia drivers again but I can't get the nvidia drivers to operate. It states that it installs the drivers when in a terminal after init 3 to shutdown X and after install it no longer makes the XF86Config-4 but rather a new XF86Config file that I am supposed to modify. I modified it replacing the "nv" with "nvidia" but still won't load.
I even tried loading MDK 10.0 with the nvidia drivers successfully then doing an upgrade to MDK 10.1 and it boots to KDE but without the nvidia drivers.
Any ideas at all? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Got it figured out. After installing the drivers and changing "nv" to "nvidia" under driver section and taking the comment out on the gfx line under module section in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf...I had to add "nvidia" to the last line of /etc/modprobe.preload file . Started up great. All is good with MDK 10.1