A friend is having desktop with on-board nVidia graphics (Its an asus motherboard without discrete GPU). I've made clean install of Ubuntu 11.10 and than installed GNOME shell. And I had following issues.
- The shell graphics were looking sluggish (white bars on top panel, etc).
- screen alignment was improper.
So I installed "recommended" nVidia drivers from Additional Drivers utility. After installation and reboot, I got
- Top panel and other shell elements looked fine.
- Screen alignment also got proper at native resolution of monitor (1366x768).
But GNOME shell performance got sloppy and animations were not smooth, and viewing Activities overview looked like shell is freezed.
So I uninstalled the drivers, and reverted back to Nouveau, but I was surprized that shell top panel looks fine even after removal of drivers, and even shell animations are smooth and perfect. But again I have screen alignment improper and portion of desktop was outside screen area at monitor's native resolution.
So I opened Displays and changed the resolution to 1280x720 (which is not the resolution I have for the same system in its Windows 7 installation, 1366x768).
But at this resolution with no nVidia drivers installed. I have all the issues solved acccept a new one. The desktop looks little bit hazy and fonts look like little blurred. I know this usually happens when you switch to the resolution lower than the recommended. But looking at the issues I've faced with proprietary drivers, this is the best working state I've attained for the system.
Note: I also tried installing updated nvidia-current package from ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates and that also didn't worked and at some point (may be due to my mistake) made system unbootable to Ubuntu, so I got is back to working by purging the ppa and deleting xorg.conf file that the driver utility created.
OP has resolved the issue themselves by uninstalling nvidia driver