Thank you all for the replies. Unfortunately, my internet got knocked out yesterday by construction, so now I'm at the coffee shop on my laptop, away from the machine in question, but I will answer as best I can. Jay asked about my video drivers. I have Intel onboard graphics. Say what you will about the performance (and I do), the drivers have never given me issues. Erik and Jim asked about inittab. Ubuntu no longer uses inittab since they switched to upstart, now that information is contained in the /etc/event.d directory. My gettys are in there, and ps tells me they are running. I have not tried to feed it input, but I suspect it would work. Andrew, I have a CRT monitor, but when I get home I'm going to look into this anyway. Thanks. Tony, that link was very enlightening. Those are pretty much my exact symptoms. I will do some more poking in that direction when I return home and report my findings. Thanks again to all. -pd-