Coincidentally, this morning I was doing the exact same thing as this fellow.  I had installed 9.10 on a Dell GX620 with an nVidia 6600, and needed to stop X in order to compile and install the driver.

I had already downloaded the Linux installable from nVidia, and found this excellent tip for getting in and out of the GUI:

To stop gdm from virtual console (after going to virtual console by giving Ctrl + Alt + F1):

sudo service gdm stop

To start after installing nvidia drivers or whatever we did in console, to start it is as simple as stopping

sudo service gdm start

via My experiments with Linux: New way to stop or start gdm/X server in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 using service command.

<ctrl-alt-f1> drops you to a console login, but gdm and X are still running in the background, and nVidia drivers will not load until gdm is stopped.

Restarting gdm will bring you back into your Gnome X session.  Alternatively, if you were just doing some work at the console and want to return to your X session without restarting gdm (which closes all your windows and programs, etc), just press <ctrl-alt-f7> to return from the console.

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