Which distro for my hardware - already tried Ubuntu and Fedora

The machine ive been using for a media pc had vista on it. Having ubuntu on another machine, I got the urge to convert the whole house to linux (4 machines). I tried out the live cd and thats when I noticed the video trouble. I thought it would be a minor issue to fix, so I went ahead and installed over the top of vista.

Hardware:
HP Pavilion slimline, (sticker hard to read now)
Nvidia video drivers (which are most likely on the motherboard)
Sharp Aquos 32in LCD

Long story short, ive tried the following
Ubuntu 9.1 - video needs proprietary drivers and video play crashes xserver requiring hard restart. also resolution is fuzzy
Ubuntu 10.04 - blank screen after boot
Ubuntu 10.10 - same as 10.04
Fedora 14 - same as Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10


I think my next task will be to try a version of Ubuntu prior to 9.1 as I really dont want to have to go back to windoz

Well, after I made this post, I finally got a working solution. Although Ubuntu 9.x probably would have worked, I downloaded and installed 8.04, ran all the updates and still had the issue of the screen being stretched too far. The solution was to go into the TV menu settings under 'view mode' and select "stretch". Done. Now I have a media pc again.

Is there any particular reason you don't want to use the proprietary nvidia drivers? They are actually quite good under linux (I've got an nvidia card and I'm using the proprietary drivers on the machine I'm typing this on).

The open source, reverse engineered, "nv" driver has never been that good, not that I blame the programmers since reverse engineering a video card is very difficult. However, the closed source proprietary drivers from nvidia work very well, including OpenGL 3d support.

Unless you've really got something against closed source drivers, just use those.