The very first time it booted, it took about five minutes to start X - the 'failed to start five times, waiting two minutes to try again' popup message happened twice. Since then, it's worked for a couple of restarts.
Until this morning. Today, it gets to the splash screen and no further. If I use nosplash, typically it gets to
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Starting NETBios name server
If I open a terminal and type
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startx
it will do it (this is what I am using now...)
If I look now at the main screen and use F2 to see the messages, it's got past the NETBios line, started CUPS, started and stopped Samba, and stopped logging the boot. There are two earlier lines about starting the MDM display manager.
It will happily finish booting into LMDE MATE and Window 7, and a bootchart will be below (in two parts because of its height).
Note that this PC needs nomodeset with Linux or it will crash to a reboot a few seconds after getting to the desktop - this is a known issue upstream.