[TheOtherCliff]

Bad vibration can do it too.  Do motors act more normally if you take the props off and try it in Rate mode?  Long ago I had vibration problems that I fixed with one of those anti-vibration mounts.  More recently I had a problem where the mount was vibrating only at a certain frequency/RPM and the problem went away when I removed the anti-vibration mount.  I don't use them any more.

If you can hover in Attitude mode, Rate mode is not too much harder.

You still didn't say whether your NW motor is plugged into position #1 (etc.).  Also, you should take off quickly.  As soon as you start the motors, jump up to knee high.  Also a reminder that the default PIDs don't work well with slow (50Hz) ESC protocol.  The solution is to use at least PWM@490Hz or PWMSync.

[chipskittles]

I have had the exact same problems as you.  My motors on a recently acquired "RTF" new to me quad would spin up past full as soon as I touched the throttle.  It flies great now but it had a rough start. 

Try lowering the motor output to 1600(not 1900).  For whatever reason, probably the so-so Gartt motors that came with mine, the quad will oscillate badly if I increase the motor output to 1900.  It's still set to 1600 and I am fine with it, I am not racing after all. 

Also, make sure your artificial horizon is tilting the right way.  It was opposite to what I thought it should have been and was incorrectly making attitude adjustments to change this to look like what i thought it should have been.  Oops.  These two things were keeping my quad from flying with a completely default config.  Instead it would do cartwheels across the yard. 

Of course what has already been said still applies;  badly out of balance props won't help things either.  I had badly balanced props too because they probably got bent up in the box.  This did not end up being my issue but it didn't help things either.