OpenGL applications & nvidia

Question

In glxgears I get about 800 fps, which is perfectly normal for my GF2. I also don't see anything wrong when I run glxinfo. There are some warnings in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, but related only to fonts and APM.
Now when I run any game like neverball or lbreakout, it just hangs. No output on xterm, cpu stays near zero, but the game won't show up. The same happens if I change the driver from nvidia to nv.
All games worked before. I don't know what change has caused them to not work, because it's been a while since I last played those games. I uninstalled the driver and installed the archlinux nvidia package recently with:
nvidia-installer --uninstall
pacman -S nvidia
so I suspected this first and reverted back to the original driver, but it didn't change anything.
Any ideas what might be wrong here?

Answer 1

I don't have mesa installed.
When I run a game from console (xterm), there is no output, it just hangs.
$ ldd /usr/X11R6/bin/glxgears
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000)
libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 (0x4002f000)
libXp.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXp.so.6 (0x4009d000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x400a5000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x400b3000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x4017f000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x40191000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x401b4000)
libGLcore.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGLcore.so.1 (0x402cd000)
libnvidia-tls.so.1 => /usr/lib/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1 (0x409be000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/libdl.so.2 (0x409c0000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
I don't see anything obviously wrong in ldd output (I may be wrong though). All files exist and are symlinks to existing libs. There is difference between my and your output: in my case most libs are in /lib/tls/, while in your case are located in /lib/, but I don't know if that means anything.