Comment 150 for bug 541620

It doesn't really seem possible to disable plymouth. If you try and remove it in synaptic, you would end up removing nearly the whole system due to its dependencies on other things. I've found you can disable the plymouth splash, by removing 'quiet splash' from the grub command line, however the plymouth process still runs as part of the bootup: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-mint-84/how-to-disable-plymouth-in-mint-ubuntu-827422/
However I have tried debian on my laptop before, which doesn't use plymouth by default, and the freezing still occurs.