Comment 31 for bug 554079

Could ureadahead have something to do with this?
I noticed this on my laptop when fooling around with ureadahead.

After testing in a vm I can do the following:
sudo touch /forcefsck
reboot.
fsck stalls at 70% for a sec, and the screen jumps directly to the desktop.
ls / shows forcefsck still exists for about 40 secs.

After removing the pack file for ureadahead and touching /forcefsck again...rebooting gets me a disk check to 70% and the screen goes blank, and it doesn't seem to ever bring up the desktop.
host cpu usage is idle.
I can ctrl-alt-f1 and log in.
/var/lib/ureadahead/pack was created.
/forcefsck is never removed

next reboot, disk check appears again (because forcefsck wasn't removed), and the desktop is loaded. /forcefsck is removed.

It is possible that the above users have been experiencing issues because many updates trigger a reprofile (such as installing/removing the nvidia driver)