During some recent re-arranging of installs I happened onto a bug that causes the boot process to seemingly halt with the plymouth splash screen displayed. It appears to be a known bug in recent releases. It occurs every third or fourth boot.
It is not actually frozen, just slowed to a crawl.
If you encounter this issue - two workarounds are to remove "splash" from your boot line in grub (reported, but not tested by me) or the edit /etc/init/kdm.conf and add the line "sleep 1" immediately above "ecec kdm" (tested and works).
It is not actually frozen, just slowed to a crawl.
If you encounter this issue - two workarounds are to remove "splash" from your boot line in grub (reported, but not tested by me) or the edit /etc/init/kdm.conf and add the line "sleep 1" immediately above "ecec kdm" (tested and works).