Just an update on this problem... I ran another apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade last night and things went mostly back to normal (whatever caused the problem appears to have been fixed). It looks like some sort of hardware probing was causing the laptop monitor to get all weird. When I tried booting into single-user mode the text screen froze and then colors faded starting with blue, then green, then red from the middle to the edges... quite cool looking, but a little scary. The non-free nvidia driver stopped working, but I managed to get the free nv driver working without much difficulty.
Chris -- Christopher H. De Vries Phone: (617) 496-7636 Postdoctoral Fellow FAX: (617) 495-7345 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 60 Garden Street MS-42 Cambridge, MA 02138 cfa-www.harvard.edu/~cdevries/
