How to stop the upgrade manager from offering updates and upgrades that potentially would harm my working 2D and 3D graphics?

Finally, I got 12.04 working as it should: with nvidia-173 drivers by downgrading xorg and locking the version:

On my 32-bit system on Athlon64, with (Albatron) NVIDIA GeForce FX5700XT, locked (/pinned) to xorg 1:7.6-7ubuntu7, xserver-xorg-core 2:11.1-0obuntu10.07, nvidia-173 173.14.35-0ubuntu0.2?

An annoying thing left is that every time the updates are checked, I get warning of partial updates, and ambiguous options of "partial update" and "close". Ambiguous in that sense that if I click close, I will get option to update a few packages, which has been OK, while "partial update" would like to update my kernel to 3.2, alter xorg, remove nvidia-173 etc., and update mesa etc. This is not what I call appropriate, after locking XORG and NVIDIA drivers to working ones. One may say according to package management logic it may be correct, but to me as an user it makes little sense.

Last Ubuntu that worked without big mess for me was 10.10, hence I will not put 12.10 to my "production" system, until I can be sure it will not trash the system again.

P.S. Is there a recommended way to keep NVIDIA GeForce FX working with 3D on Ubuntu... in future?