Freeze after login (failsafe gnome too)... Virus? Display?

[Mr Mojito]

Hello I get to my prob quick because I need an answer as soon as possible,

Basic problem, Linux Mint 9 freezes when get past the login screen.
Since my laptop is almost always at home I recently set up the display to automatically detect and use my external monitor as the primary monitor, with the regular laptop screen as the additional monitor. I've kept my laptop on for weeks up until yesterday, when I had to take it somewhere. Turned it on and I could not get past the login screen. I tried Gnome, KDE, xterm, and even fail safe Gnome and they all froze. went back home plugged in my external monitor and it worked. turned off the comp last night relieved.

Today, though, I tried to move a panel that that auto-hides @ the top of the scree to the bottom, and it froze AGAIN (ironically was just about to attempt to reconfigure the monitors back to original). I'm back to the same situation of a hang after login screen.

1. what is going on and how can I fix this?
2. Is there anyway to enter the terminal before full boot up and maybe go back to a very stable kernel (not the failsafe Gnome - that freezes too)
3. is there any way to reconfigure my LM9 xorg file from an Ubuntu 10.4 Live CD (what I'm currently using)?
4. in the same vein as question 3 - I can see all my data via the live CD, however I have no way to back it up, cause when I try to copy it, It says I don't have permission. any way to get around this?

extra info:
'07 Lenovo T61
Dual Core 2Ghz, 2GB ram
Nvida GeForce 8600 (i think... it's not a fancy one)

-changed the Display set up via Nvida Driver monitor preferences tool (i think it changed the xorg file for me)
-performance has been fine up until this point, making me think maybe a virus got activated when I rebooted my comp?

Thanks so much for your help!

[crash123]

I hate to repost, because I just talked about this on another thread, but I've been having the exact same problem with getting Mint to work with an external monitor. For whatever reason, it seems to be connected to my Belkin N1 Expresscard wifi adapter (ath9k). First time I tried the external monitor, everything worked fine until I started messing with my internet connection. It froze after that, and I had to do a hard shut down (CTL+PrintScreen, then REISUO wouldn't even work). Now it freezes right after logging in if I'm connected to an external monitor and have the wifi adapter in. Without the wifi adapter, though, it's been okay when using the external monitor. But I don't have any problems using the adapter unless I"m using the external monitor.

I just switched to Mint from Ubuntu, and I've never had this problem before, even with the same hardware. If anybody knows a way to fix this problem, other than this workaround I've been using, I'd appreciate it, too.

[Mr Mojito]

*bump* Please, this did not answer the question... we are both stuck!

The only bit of advice I can give you is, if you still have a live CD, use that for the time being... if you've backed up your data reinstall.

mine is partially backed up, but there's some really important stuff I wrote two days before it happened that I can't access!