X/GNOME Crashes the whole system

[mgalvin nycap rr com]

When I log out/restart via GNOME, it seems durning the process of X/GNOME shuting down, the entire system crashes and I have to hard reboot. This also occurs when booting up since the gui startup screen starts and stops x a few times. I have to boot in init 3. I am using a Dell Precision 360 with nVidia Quadro NVS AGP 8x video card and I do have the NVIDIA video driver installed(it works on other systems with the 2.6.x kernel)