I fixed the Dell E6500 kernel panic issue, by removing the kernel and reinstalling it. It must have been a failure of some kind during the first installation.
However, neither Nvidia driver would install on 3.7. Actually, 310-19 would install but would not drive the Quadro correctly, so I had to nuke the Nvidia drivers and install the nouveau driver. It looks fine, so no complaints.
System: Host: delle6500 Kernel: 3.7-0.towo-siduction-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit, gcc: 4.7.2)
Desktop: KDE 4.8.4 (Qt 4.8.2) Distro: siduction 12.1-RC1 Desperado - kde - (201205152133)
Machine: System: Dell product: Latitude E6500
Mobo: Dell model: 0PP476 Bios: Dell version: A14 date: 07/31/2009
CPU: Dual core Intel Core2 Duo CPU P8600 (-MCP-) cache: 3072 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 9575.98
Clock Speeds: 1: 2401.00 MHz 2: 2393.995 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA G98M [Quadro NVS 160M] bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.12.4 drivers: nouveau (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1920x1200@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on NV98 GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.5 Direct Rendering: Yes
Network: Card-1: Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY driver: b43-pci-bridge bus-ID: 0c:00.0
IF: wlan0 state: up mac: 00:23:4e:ab:86:7a
Card-2: Intel 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection driver: e1000e ver: 2.1.4-k port: efe0 bus-ID: 00:19.0
IF: eth1 state: down mac: 00:21:70:d4:d3:04
Drives: HDD Total Size: 120.0GB (46.0% used) 1: model: OCZ_VERTEX
Info: Processes: 176 Uptime: 11 min Memory: 891.8/3948.4MB Runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: 4.7.2 Client: Shell inxi: 1.8.20