nvidia-current Driver Failing to Load

I've had a really odd issue bothering me the entire time that I've been running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). About half the time when I start up my computer I get a message that Ubuntu has failed to load the proprietary nvidia driver and is running in low graphics mode.

HPET problems

I have a Compaq Presario F700 laptop. I love it. The only issue I've run into with it, that's hard ware related, is a weird tendency for the boot process to stutter while under battery power. When not plugged in and booting there are several points where it freezes and I have to press a key to get it to continue booting. This happened both while running Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04 and Arch, each with the latest kernel at the time. So I'm pretty sure it isn't software related.