laptop screen hosed except with X and nvidia driver

[Byron Poland]

I have a dell 8500 with a GeForce4 Ti 4200 Go in it.  I put breezy on
it recently, and have been experiencing some weird crashes, and other
issues.

The weirdest right now, is that the computer refuses to display
anything on the screen (boot logo and bios data included).   However
once X starts and loads the nvidia driver, X works fine.

This is a huge problem as I can't get to the bios or use the nv driver
for some troubleshooting.

I've tried rolling the nvidia driver back to the legacy one in the
repositories, but that didn't help.  also tried removing all power to
the computer, ac and battery.  I guess the nvidia card's bios is
corrupted or something.  anyone have any ideas?