Gdm X and nvidia

[paul@thirdaspect.net]

Hello all,
I have been running into this issue with both woody and sid and I am not quite
certain what the issue may be.  I am relatively new to debian so I am not sure
what I am doing wrong.  Basically I want to install X on my toshiba laptop. 
However I believe I get everything working fine but I just get the NVidia logo
and then gdm crashes and goes back to NVidia again.  Here is essentially what I
do.
   apt-get update
   apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-<version>
   apt-get install xserver-xfree86
 Now I would think startx command would work at this time but it doesn't so I
try installing gdm
   apt-get install gdm
 this whole process actually took me a couple of tries, apt-get it weird
sometimes it chokes and you just to re-update it and try again, Am I doing
soemthing wrong?  
   dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
 this is what I use to configure X

   I put in all the required info, guessing only on my horizsync and
verticalsync from postings on the web (I would think it's ok cause the NVidia
logo is perfect) But then gdm just chokes.

I just want x to work.

Paul