OpenGL - Annoying Box Appears in X at startup

I finally broke down and picked up OpenGL drivers from nVidia (I'm probably the last guy on earth to have played TuxRacer). The install went smoothly, but now when I start X (Gnome and KDE are both afflicted), I get what almost looks to be a test box on the upper-left corner of the screen. It's just sort of green/brown and has a corrugated cardboard texture to it.

Also, when I log out of an X session, there's a big square block of green bars with reddish edges left on the screen. To say the least, this is very annoying. I can rid myself of the block in X by starting TuxRacer or zSNES. It appears that changing the video mode kills the stupid thing. However, I can't rid myself of the block on the console when I log out of X (both blocks just sort of "hover" overtop of everything else. They can't be scrolled offscreen and everything opens underneath them).

Here's some technical info:

Driver files installed:
- NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4191.rh80up.i686.rpm
- NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-4191.i386.rpm

Hardware:
- Riva TNT2 M64 Chipset
- 4x AGP (OpenGL is set to 2x)

Miscellaneous Linux Info:
- RH 8.0
- Previously using MESA drivers
- uname -r reports 2.4.18-14 (gotta recompile...)
- XFree86 version is 4.2.0

Anyone with suggestions or solutions please let me know. Thanks!

Unfortunaly I can't help you,but I can tell you that the NVIDIA drivers completely suck,all 3d applications crash my computer after ±10 minutes.And they crash the whole system,not only X,so I have to shutdown my computer uncleanly (this is even worse than Windows). I can't play dvd's,some audio cd's and games,which really sucks (I want a Mac!)
This all is ofcourse off-topic,but I feel so depressed...

I had some trouble with them crashing X at first, but a few tweaks to XFree86.conf fixed it. What you describe sounds like an AGP problem....

This line:

configures AGP support under the nVidia OpenGL drivers. It can be 0 (no AGP sppt), 1 (use nVidia internal AGP sppt), 2 (try to use AGPART), 3 (use any sppt). Try setting it to 2, if that doesn't work, 1.

Also, check Appendix F for more details on AGP setup. What card are you using? Some of their cards seem to have spotty (GeForce2 MX series) or non-existant (pre-GeForce2) OpenGL support.

//LOL
Dammit! We'll get SOMEONE'S drivers working by the end of this thread!

Lol,I have a geforce 256,but I dont have the nvidia module anymore in my X config file ,because after I tried upgrading the drivers,X kept crashing.The only way to install them again is to get a new kernel version,but I can't compile a new version of the kernel (I get errors,even if I change my config a hunderd times).But who needs stupid propriatary drivers anyway?I like GNU/Linux because it is so stable,and if I want to crash my computer (not X,but the whole system) I can just install Windows (TM)

Hmm.. I rebooted into Linux today and the problem vanished. Do you have to restart Linux for XFree86.conf changes to take effect?

The only things I changed were removing the nVidia Splash screen at X startup and skipping the bandwidth check. Well... no news is good news I s'pose.

I've seen the bug many a time and yes the only way of getting rid of the box for good is to reboot. There's no way to pull the card out of that weird state with existing software that I know of. I'm inclined to think it's an nvidia driver bug as the nv driver from the XFree86 people has never done that on me and the nvidia driver does it just about any time I try to use multiple desktops whatsoever.

Okay, I'm dumb. How do you remove the Nvidia splashscreen?

--- Cerbere

Supposedly you just add this to your video card section of you XF86Config(-4) file: