xserver/gnome freezes on first boot

[J Doe]

I installed dapper drake flight 5 on a pretty standard laptop (3 year
old compaq presario with standard hardware). The install went fine.
The installer seemed to recognize all the hardware correctly (wireless
and ethernet cards, video, etc.) and did not report any problems.

On the first boot, after logging in as the default user, xserver just
freezes. I waited for about 10-15 minutes before doing a cold reboot.
No difference. Looks like the window manager is in the midst of
initializing when this occurs. Any idea what may have caused this?

The following is a link to a similar problem in the ubuntu forum that
describe this (or similar) issue but no solution:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=144797&referrerid=80694

Thanks!