I recently installed Hardy Heron as a dual boot with Vista Home Premium on my laptop. While in Linux, I was prompted to update my graphics drivers, so i did. Upon reboot, all I see in my Linux OS is a corrupted screen. other than reinstalling it, how do I fix this?

System Specs-

2.0 Ghz Core2 Duo
256MB Nvidia 8600M GT
1 GB RAM

I doubt you were prompted to update. You were probably asked if you wanted to enable the restricted driver? There are thousands of threads on this at the official forums. Try searching over there.

Why not reinstall it? You did use the "wubi" installer didn't you?

Be carefull downloading "wubi". I had to try several mirrors before I came up with a copy that matched the published MD5 hash. It's probably a just clerical error (wrong MD5 number published), but better safe than sorry.