Open dialogues causing crashes

[fordio]

I am running ubuntu 8.10 on a compaq presario laptop. I've had a problem
with the Nvidia drivers supplied by the distro, so I upgraded to find
the problem still exists in both the latest release and the latest
pre-release.

Every time a file open dialogue is displayed in any application from
Gnome, X appears to crash. Sometimes the mouse will still show movement,
sometimes not. Sometimes I can get to a terminal sometimes not. If I can
get to a terminal, killing the application that invoked the open
dialogue will restore X to normal. It does appear that screen re-drawing
may be the problem.

To reproduce the problem:
1. System >> Preferences >> Appearance >> Visual Effects
2. Select either normal or extra
3. Choose to keep settings
4. Applications >> Office >> OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet
5. Select File >> Open
6. You should see the crash

Here are some other peoples perspectives of the problem I have found:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=128901
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1079091
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=996247
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=984645

I've attached the bug report which was run after a crash that happened
with X launched as -logverbose 6.

Any help would be great
Cheers
Steve

[fordio]

Bump. Anyone?