Comment 40 for bug 212648

I did the following and installed apparently the 'fixed' 173.08 drivers. now everything works so far.
however i had to reboot esc and ask ubuntu to fix the xorg for me during boot up

[Update]
Nvidia reports
 (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1639245&postcount=13):
 Re: This web page crashex 169.12 and 173.08 but not 169.04
 It should be using the one from the server. That looks like a bug in
 the package.

 The .run installer will always create a symlink from
 libnvidia-wfb.so.1 to libnvidia-wfb.so.1.x.y.z, and then will create a symlink from
 libwfb.so to libnvidia-wfb.so.1 only if an existing libwfb.so doesn't
 already exist. The idea is that if the server installed one, it'll use that,
 and if someone used a distribution package and then installed the .run
 file over it, the distro package would have already created a
 libwfb.so -> libnvidia-wfb.so.1 symlink. In practice, I don't think that was
 communicated clearly enough to the distributions.

[Testcase]
To reproduce the bug, gedit killer.html and paste the following line:

<div style="border: 1px solid #000; border-left: none; height:
 200000px;"></div>

Save, close, and open with Firefox. WARNING: This will probably crash X
 for users with proprietary Nvidia drivers and 8xxx series cards (at
 least it crashes for me).

[Workaround]
sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/nvidia/libwfb.so.xserver-xorg-core
 /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so

Or alternately,

To temporarily fix the problem (if you're running nvidia-glx-new)
 download the updated libwfb and then copy it over to your
 /usr/lib/xorg/modules directory, and then create a new symbolic link to libwfb:

$ wget
 http://people.freedesktop.org/~aplattner/wfb/Linux-x86_64/libnvidia-wfb.so.173.08
$ mv libnvidia-wfb.so.173.08 /usr/lib/xorg/modules/
$ sudo chown root /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libnvidia-wfb.so.173.08
$ sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libnvidia-wfb.so.173.08
 /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so

Restart xorg and everything should function normally. Enjoy!

To restore back to the original, drop back to the X terminal
 (ctrl+alt+f1) and then link back the original library.

$ sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libnvidia-wfb.so.169.12
 /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so

instead of libnvidia-wfb.so.173.08

And your X should function as normal without having to reinstall the
 nvidia drivers.