http://jhn.blogentis.net/2006/06/17/black-screen-of-death It's been a while since I solved this in ubuntu. After starting Xorg, when pressing ALT-CTRL+F1-6 to change to a console, the screen was becoming blank black. There was no way to return to Xorg but CTRL-ALT-DEL was soft rebooting the system. This bug started somewhere between dapper upgrades in March, I expected it to be fixed with another upgrade until dapper made it to stable release. Blogentis