Installed 7.04, black screen / orange background with cursor frozen on startup

I have tried appending noapic to the kernel as per a forum user's suggestion, with seemingly no change.

I have now tried the suggestions in this bug report

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ver/+bug/89853

(the ones in the original message regarding xserver reconfig and using a vesa driver)

and the problem remains apparently exactly the same.

After unplugging my slave drive it seems that I now make it all the way to the "username" screen every time, I see the prompt pulse once or twice in the box, am even able to move my mouse for the first two or three seconds, then I hear the sound, and then it all freezes.

I am running onboard realtek ac97 for my sound, if this could possibly be another part of the puzzle.

I take the last comment back, after 3 or 4 consecutive boots all the way to the username entry, I am now back to freezing at just an orange background and loading cursor.

As I was typing the last message, my other computer was off. I went back and tried once again to boot, this time intent on trying to log in before it froze, the first time it simply froze at the loading cursor again, the second time however i managed to log all the way in. Sitting there, ecstastic, I waited for it to freeze any second but everything seemed to be running fine.

So I started checking everything out and tried to fiddle with the resolution (the maximum was 1024, although I have a widescreen monitor capable of 1680x1050) I clicked help and searched around there to see if there was any information on how to raise this limit. Finding nothing I closed the window and it then suddenly froze.

I estimate the total usage time after logging in was around a minute or a little more.

Trying again and again with different approaches, I now unplugged my printer and speakers and tried again to log in before a freeze. This time I made it halfway through typing my password before it froze and then something that had not ever happened before, did, a blue checkered bar appeared across the top of the screen, roughly 1/10-1/15th of the total monitor height wide.

My computer may just be haunted.

Two more reboot attempts yielded freezes during the actual splash screen, something that had not happened before.

During the second one I left to go take care of something, came back and it was still frozen and decided to try to reset my cpu clock to its factory setting (it was slightly overclocked), so i unplugged my USB keyboard and as I did so the splash screen suddenly started again and finished, only to freeze again at the orange background/loading cursor.

So anyway I proceed to reset the clock to normal and this has not fixed the problem.