Ubuntu Installation :: White Screen After Installing Nvidia Restricted Driver As Prompted

I've had Ubuntu installed on my desktop for a month now, and its all worked like a charm, so I'm thrilled. I then decided to install it on my old laptop as well to see if I could breath a bit more life into it, and to get used to working Ubuntu a bit more. The laptop had 18.6GB partitioned to C:// drive or windows XP, and an empty 18.6GB D:// drive, so I deleted the D:// drive in XP using the Microsoft disk utilities tool, all well and good. I then did a clean install of Ubuntu-9.10-desktop with an Ubuntu CD into the largest continuous free space, and it set it up nicely. When I first booted it up there were a ton of updates to install, as there had been on the desktop first time, which I dutifully installed. As on the desktop a little notice popped up telling me to install the NVidia Proprietary driver for the NVidia card (specifically "NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 96)[Recommended]"), as it had when I installed it on the desktop, so I chose to install that and then restarted the computer.

On restarting GRUB2 loaded, and it booted Ubuntu. I then saw the little white logo on the black screen for a couple of seconds, and then the screen goes completely white, with some pixels left behind fading to white slightly slower. First time through I held down the power button to force shut down, and on restart exactly the same thing happened. This time I held down alt+sysrq and went through the R, E, I, S, U, B sequence, however as opposed to usual I didn't get a black terminal-like screen after hitting any of the buttons, although it did reboot on B. It did boot correctly in recovery mode, however I was at a loss what to do here. Incidentally, the same problem occurred when I booted to previous version of the kernel as well.

Then I decided that as I didn't have any data to lose, and it was still early in the day, I'd do a clean re-install. This time I chose to ignore the updates, and just install the NVidia driver as prompted to check that it was the driver causing the trouble. Having installed the driver and restarted I got exactly the same problem as before - definitely this pesky NVidia driver, not any of the updates.So here I am at clean install 3, having just got all the updates, but not having downloaded the NVidia driver as prompted, with little desire to go through yet more reinstalls. My questions are:

1) Do I need to install this NVidia driver? The rest of the computer specifications are fairly paltry by modern standards, and I won't be doing anything graphics intensive on it (the most graphical program will probably be Battle for Wesnoth) and I I don't need to install it, not installing it seems to be the easiest way to solve the problem.

2) If I do need to install it how would I go around doing this without getting my charming white screen?

3) Is there a way of removing the driver from recovery mode that doesn't involve a clean install again? I have tried sudo apt-get purge nvidia-driver, which tells me there isn't any installed. I have tried sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf which made no difference. I have tried dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and this didn't help. I have tried a couple of other commands as well but I can't remember them, however I would probably recognise them if I saw them again.

Onto System information - pulled from listed specifications and SysInfo:

General System Information
Release:Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic)
GNOME: 2.28.1 (Ubuntu 2009-11-03)

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