Comment 6 for bug 303825

I think this bug still exists. I observed a failure with similar symptoms for kernel 2.6.28-11.36, which can be worked around by uninstalling nvidia-common, doing the kernel upgrade, then reinstalling nvidia-common. However, this workaround is only useful for expert users. The consequences of the bug are very high - initramfs fails to be regenerated and the system can be rendered unbootable (that happened to me).

Raising the importance to critical. I think nvidia-common is a weak link at the moment. Since it is installed for everyone, a weakness affects everyone even if they don't have the old drivers it is setup to detect and address.