After fiddling about all last night trying to get the laptop to boot, I gave up around 1am and went and played some World of Warcraft. Then just before bed I checked the Ubuntu forums again. A bit of searching for my laptop name and model led me to a thread with some helpful hint, including the suggestion to add

noapic

to the end of the boot command.

This solved all my problems, and let me resolve the issue I had with having to re-compile the NVIDIA driver every time, let me install the restricted drivers and the necessary bits to get the laptop working properly.