Stuck in Black-Screen-at-Login - also plasma-desktop freezes

[lakitu]

hey all - first off i have aphasia, so bear with me.

have used ubuntu 10.10 as my main/only OS for about 1-2 years - someone really ran that thing off a cliff tho, with Unity. no offense - i love ubuntu & hope they get it back together (i.e. drop Unity) soon.

but so, i am trying Linux Mint. the first install had blocky, unreadable panel menu (kick off menu) problems with Cinnamon & my graphics card (Radeon HD 2400 XT, for any debuggors who take this up) - trying to fix it up i lost major functionality & ended up formatting.

now - i reinstalled, this time trying KDE.

KDE is cool - am very pleased with it... problem is, seemingly out of nowhere it got caught in some kind of loop where it froze during a session, i rebooted, & then every reboot opened the session that caused the plasma-desktop i believe it's called(?), to freeze up.

(it froze in such a way i could not use the kickoff menu to run Session Management(?) to stop the endless re loading of a freezing session up, nor could i use the little alt+f2 utility.)

so for anyone helping me here: i could login, see the desktop - but something with the session (my guess is Kate opening a text file that was not mounted anymore on a little sd card - but i have no idea) makes the desktop panel freeze.

at one point i was able to grapple some functionality out of the desktop, which was great until this - by chance there was some updates available & i saw they were xorg so i installed them... from that situation i now am at my present situation:

i now get a BLACK SCREEN at the login (i.e. instead of the login) everytime - it seems to do a disk check & then reboot every other time, but when it doesn't it just sits.

i have tried:
alt+shift+f1-thru-f7, with no result.
adding nomodeset (as i think this is a graphics issue) to the grub start-up utility (where do i put it? in the root line? either before or after quiet-splash or whatever??)

for what it's worth, i HAD installed the ATI Catalyst (or whatever it's called) driver from their site (as recommended by someone).

here is a fuller hardware spec - it's a 5 year old homebuilt computer which had absolutely no hardware problems:

0 bus P5N-E SLI
/0/0 memory 128KiB BIOS
/0/5 processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6700 @ 2.66GHz
/0/5/b memory 32KiB L1 cache
/0/5/c memory 4MiB L2 cache
/0/3c memory 8GiB System Memory
/0/3c/0 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR2 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
/0/3c/1 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR2 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
/0/3c/2 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR2 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
/0/3c/3 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR2 800 MHz (1.2 ns)

& again

/0/100/3/0 display RV610 [Radeon HD 2400 XT]




i am at the point (with some moderate-to-severe health problems) i need a solid OS that i don't have to screw around with, that also is featureful enough - i am weighing Windows 7 (altho i haven't tried 8) along with OSX maybe 10.6.8. i would like to continue using GNU/Linux, but as many of you probably know, it seems things are pretty off-kilter at the moment, the big-name Ubuntu ending up with Unity & falling behind - i was hoping Linux Mint was the sensible follow-up to it, but looking at my second reinstall in a few days, i am giving this one last chance before i go to a solider OS, say Mac OSX (altho i never could stand Mac haha).

browsing - i find this bug, which possibly is one layer of my problems: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=672223 - even if that is resolved tho, i still have the freezing plasma-desktop/panel/kickoff menu to deal with.

someone suggested, if you find this thru google & have that problem, that is a usb issue. there was a stray (broken.. RIP) harddrive haha that got plugged in. however unplugging it didn't resolve it, probably do to the session-that-never-ends thing (i.e. i don't like that - even if it didn't cause a endless freeze-boot-loop).

so - first is the black screen (i realize i could just reinstall, but if it's just one problem after another, i'm migrating to a more rocksolid OS..) - if i get that resolved, the endless plasma-desktop freeze. i have tried the 'failsafe' sessions which i think all had the recurring plasma-desktop thing.

the only other thing i did i can think of was set a sort of first-timer's bash script (running inadyn) to start-up each boot.. i could've bobbled that but i don't think it's that. it was a one line (besides the header) inadyn command, & i used the startup utility to add it to the startup programs.

EDIT: i CAN get to a root shell, via recovery mode(? i think it's called) boot (at the grub menu). i cannot however run sudo apt-get update etc because it says something about 'the file is unreadable'. i am not sure why that is...

are these 3 separate problems?