@p i had that OOM problem with the xorg intel driver. the solution was to use kms or how it's called. can't really blame nouveau for nvidias fuckery ;)
the first own install i used was suse 9.0 iirc. everything worked as well or better than today. including printing i had set up using the graphical UI.
@p ah, ok, i read it like nouveau was misbehaving :)
for me it was X memory leaking because of the broken intel driver. it took days but in the end X had allocated all the memory and things got wonky. was really annoying and hard to debug as it took so long to happen.