[CentOS] trying to rebuild an old nvidia driver

Let me start by saying that no, I can't get a new card for my user.

So, I've got the 96 nvidia driver. I've rebuilt it several times before, and Nvidia's installer's always worked fine. Actually, I have the 73 on my system, and just updated to 5.5, and no problem.

HOWEVER, I last rebuilt my user's driver back in mid-April, after the last kernel update (was that mid-March?), and everything was fine... until the other day, when he walked in to tell me he'd had to reboot, and it wasn't working, and dropped him to command line.

I rebuilt it... and it dies. As in, sometimes, I have to go to another machine and ssh in to reboot, and sometimes, I have to power cycle his system. I get garbage with the nvidia driver; with nv, I can at least get one of his two monitors working.

When I try x with the nvidia driver, it just keeps printing out initializing GART, I think it is (I've lost the log), and then that it has failed to allocate ROP.

Anyone see anything like this? I've unpacked the executable, and started working with the makefiles (and yes, I do understand makefiles), but see things like a lot of warning in the compile, and the one that makes me nervous is make CC=cc KBUILD_OUTPUT=/lib/modules/2.6.18-194.3.1.el5/build KBUILD_VERBOS E=1 -C /lib/modules/2.6.18-194.3.1.el5/source SUBDIRS=/scratch/NVIDIA-Linux- x86-96.43.13-pkg1/usr/src/nv modules make -C /lib/modules/2.6.18-194.3.1.el5/build \ KBUILD_SRC=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-194.3.1.el5-i686 \ KBUILD_EXTMOD="/scratch/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.13-pkg1/usr/src/nv" -f /usr/ src/kernels/2.6.18-194.3.1.el5-i686/Makefile modules test -e include/linux/autoconf.h -a -e include/config/auto.conf || ( \ echo; \ echo " ERROR: Kernel configuration is invalid."; \ echo " include/linux/autoconf.h or include/config/auto.conf are mis sing."; \ echo " Run 'make oldconfig && make prepare' on kernel src to fix it ."; \ echo; \ /bin/false)

Even though both those files exist and are where they should be. I've googled, and find no references to those, and really hope it's not the card going bad.... So, any clues?

mark