Ubuntu Installation :: 10.10 Nvidia Driver Install Causes System Reboot Crash

This was my first experience with Ubuntu, I was told to switch the hard drives on my computer and put the Windows drive in a safe place for the install. The first time I did the install on the hard drive (which was the clean second hard drive that came with my computer), I either didn't realize I believe I didn't realize I had to click a button and thought the install had gotten stuck, and therefore cut off the install midway through. The second time around the install went without a hitch, and I was able to boot to desktop once. There, I was notified that I needed/should install NVIDIA drivers, I believe version 173 was listed as the next most recent drives (the other was "current"), I have an NVIDIA GeForce 7350LE graphics card, and after installing the drivers, I went to the restart menu as directed and clicked restart, not shut down but restart, and there were several listed errors on the text/DOS screen, shutdown errors I believe (the errors were 5 digits and were something like 56759 or something like that, I can't be certain if I'm remembering right, though, but there were two errors going over again). I then proceeded to turn off the computer manually, and upon it coming on again, instead of the normal Ubuntu flash screen before login, a more choppy Ubuntu 10.10 screen popped up and it led me to the DOS mode, where I was able to login, but it did me no good because I don't know command logic for Ubuntu. The best I did (its the best I ever do when these things happen) is get menus to pop up that are basically useless. I turned the computer off and on again three times, and tried booting directly from disk, but that failed.

I'm actually using the same computer I just reinserted the Windows drive back in after the frustrating experience. Windows has been giving me problems itself, and I really wanted to switch to Ubuntu but I need to know that this is a fluke and not the norm. I can live with this sort of thing being so uncommon I must have did something that was very strange and out of the ordinary to my computer. But if its commonplace, I want to know that too, because that's just something I can't live with.