I upgraded Ubuntu to 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) last night and had an unpleasant surprise this morning – the fonts were upside down! The login screen looked ok, but after logging in things weren’t so good.

I did find both a work around (set “Visual Effects” to none) and a solution (unstall Nvidia drivers).

WORK AROUND:  Set your visual effects to none, go to System / Preferences / Appearance / Visual Effects

Keep in mind that if this happens to you, the menu options aren’t right either – Preferences is the first option and Appearance is the second option (even though it’s the second from the bottom when displayed – pick second from top).

SOLUTION:  It turns out that the problem was the upgrade either installed or found some Nvidia video drivers and Compis  thought it should use those over the “default” drivers.  To fix the problem, I went into Synaptic and did a full uninstall of everything with nvidia in the name (thanks to an article on Launchpad).  As an aside, the Nvidia drivers did NOT show up under the Hardware Driver tab – so, just because you don’t see it there, don’t assume that they aren’t partly installed.

Hope this helps someone!!!