startx gives me a blank screen, numlock works but rest of the machine is locked

[meshuga]

So, I finally got everything working using latest NVIDIA closed source driver. I decided to plug in my speakers, and started listening to mp3s thru XMMS. About then, everything died. My terminal was locked, I couldn't even ssh in, but mp3s continued to play.

When I rebooted, i ran startx again, and was confronted with a blank screen. After rebooting again, I parsed my XFree86.0.log file, only to find it looking like X coredumped in it, alot of gibberish to me. I can add it if you want it.
Also, when I tried to switch to the open source, I got a signal11. Dunno if this is related or not, I'm using the vesaFB drivers at the moment.

heres my info:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev a1)
NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run
Slackware 9.1.0
cat: /proc/driver/nvidia/cards/0: No such file or directory
Duron 1400 is proc, and ECS k7sa5 is motherboard.

This ran nearly 3 days flawless, still confused why it suddenly did that.

[LordMorgul]

Verify you can still insert the nvidia module into the kernel, manually, to see the result (boot to runlevel 3 so it doesn't try to load first).

Remove vesafb while testing, eliminate variables. Not having the proc directory /proc/driver/nvidia means the kernel module is not loaded.
Yes, post the X log and output of (after inserting the nvidia module):
dmesg