You have help from some folks more knowledgeable than I am, fortunately. But I'll throw out a few more suggestions/links that might be worth trying.

Have you also tried typing Ctrl-Alt-F1 to bring up a virtual terminal?
Have you tried appending "nouveau.noaccel=1" to the boot line in GRUB2?
Here are some alternative instructions for installing a proprietary Nvidia driver:
http://tinyurl.com/82j7pfx
Maximus. "Re: Nvidia cards and others." 5 Nov. 2011.
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2012/04/so ... -with.html
Martin, Caitlyn. "Solving Display Problems With Some NVIDIA Chipsets After Installing Slackware 13.37 or Salix OS 13.37." 5 Apr. 2012.
As a method of getting the proprietary Nvidia driver in your /home directory, you could download the driver to a working system and save/transfer it to a USB flash drive -- it's probably 40-50 MB in size. Then you could use a minimal Live CD (such as Puppy Linux) to graphically copy the driver over to Salix's /home partition, and follow the procedures above.
HTH and Good Luck.