When I do a fresh install of Ubuntu 13.04 on a computer with an older Nvidia Quadro FX 500 128mb agp card, I cannot get the display to work.

There are a number of things that happen:
On some fresh installs the screen goes completely yellow.
After other fresh installs the screen goes completely black.

I have tried to install the Nvidia drivers titled: current, current-updates, and nouveau.
When I install one of these drivers, the desktop becomes visible with a 640x480 resolution and no unity. I can right-click on the background and navigate up to the settings, where I see the display settings only recognize the monitor as "laptop" and stay stuck in that one resolution option.

The farthest I have gotten is using this answer which allowed me to see the entire desktop at the proper resolution, but no unity launcher or top panel. Upon restart the resolution reverts back to 1280x1024, which does not conform to the monitor (leaves about 3 inches of blank space on either side of the image) and unity is still not present.

???????????
Which is the proper driver for an older Nvidia card?
How do I restart Unity so that appears again?
What is the display setup process once I have done a fresh install (since it is not auto-detecting)?

Many thanks