FYI users with recent-ish NVIDIA woes

I've always installed, without headache, proprietary nvidia drivers via the 'stop gdm; sh NVIDIA.blah blah' method (downloaded from nvidia). It's never been an issue for me -it just always worked. Very recently I found that (post “Statler” R20111125) the method no longer worked for me -it would appear to install, but x would fail. I tried many methods to get it working but eventually fell back to nouveau or whatever non-free is in the repos 195.something-or-other.
A few days ago nvidia put out "Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver 275.43 December 14, 2011" which, finally, installed and worked without x failing.
Previous to this I always used the 290.xx. I tried the 290.xx again today and the same issues arose. I do notice some tearing with the 275.43 that was not present with the 290.xx but at least I've got X going and can watch 720p.
My card is a G72M [Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300] and back when I was testing Ubuntu 11.04 or an early 11.10 I had headaches due to my card (Unity problem) and I subscribed to "[Bug 728745] Re: [nvidia, 7300, 7400] display freeze when using unity desktop" and noticed today that someone posted an update claiming that the Dec 14th, 2011 version of 275.43 fixes THAT issue. see: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/728745 and http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthr … ?p=2510957  Personally, I could care less about solving the Unity issue as I've given Unity all the time I can and have decided that it's evil, BUT the fact that I can get the driver to work on #! caused me immense joy.
Hopefully someone else will find this useful.   
I haven't a clue how nvidia handles version numbers -275.43 dated dec 14, 2011 seemed odd when I saw it as I always used 'later' builds (290.xx dated earlier that 12/2011) oh well. It works and I'm happy.