[Tfug] OS Puzzle

[arizray at comcast.net]

As a bit of history several people helped me to try and solve what I perceived as a problem with the gnome desktop. Basically during boot the system halts right after login. I pc is a gateway P4 2.8ghz, 1.5gb memory, 80gb HDD machine. I was successfully using the machine until recently.

After much troubleshooting I decided to swap the "bad" harddrive into my other machine and it worked perfectly. Had the Ubuntu (ver. 8.10) progress bar present during boot etc. Placing it the original machine still had the fault of course but I now know that the S/W on the drive is ok. T then tried to T/S further by removing the 2 memory cards, one at a time to see if one of the modules might be bad and no improvement or solution was found so I have to assume that the memory is o.k.

The video card is part of the mother board and I don't know how to test it as it does display.

I would like anyone's ideas.

THANKS