For those of you who are having issues with the new driver, I wonder if having multiple monitors connected to a more recent vintage card may be the cause of some issues. On my machine, I have three monitors, and I noticed that after the new driver was installed, I was unable to boot to the desktop even though I could see the Nvidia Web driver detected when booting. So, on a hunch, I unplugged one monitor, and the desktop boots right up. Plugging in the third monitor after I log in results in all monitors working like they did previously.
This reminds me of problems with old video cards from ten years ago back in the early days...