Ubuntu 6.1 Boot-up fail

[john france]

Hi All,

I have recently re-installed Ubuntu 6.1,and I am having trouble
booting it up.

When I select 6.1 from GRUB it gives the 
following error message:

Kernel Panic - not synching: IO APIC+TIMER doesn't work
 - boot with APIC = DEBUG
and send a report. Then try booting with the "NOAPIC" option.

What does this message mean and what can be done about it?

My computer has an ECS NFORCE4M-A MB, ATHLON 64 X2 chip
 and 3Gb of RAM.

I have tried altering the boot parameters as suggested,
 but all to no avail.

Both 32 Bit & 64 Bit versions of the software have been tried. 
I had 6.1 loaded but upgraded to 7.04. Previously 6.1 
worked a treat, but I upgraded thinking that I was going 
to a better version. Unfortunately I didn't realise that 7.04
had all the multimedia files and Java removed,
which I required to run Frostwire etc.

Can someone suggest what may be the problem? 
Thanking you in anticipation.

Regards

John