Black screen when booting and Firefox trouble

[Damien Hull]

A friend of mine is having trouble with her install of Gutsy Gibbon.

    I am running the newest version. I started with the 64bit and I have
    now downgraded to x86 in frustration. I'm running 1.2GB RAM, AMD 64
    processor 3200+ running 7.10 ubuntu. Still having the black
    screenissue on loading and now Firefox takes forever to accept text
    in text imput boxes.

I've been running Gutsy for over 4 weeks. I've never had these problems. 
I've also helped others install Gutsy and they didn't have any problems.

I hope someone out there has some suggestions I can pass along.