Laptop weirdness

[Linda]

I had a toshiba laptop set up and working great. This afternoon when we 
tried to use crtl+alt+F1 to open a terminal the screen went blank and 
the only way we could get it back was to power off the laptop. I 
repeated this a few times.  It has crossed my mind that I did an update 
of some libs today immediately before it started being flakey, but I 
don't know which ones, teach me to just say okay. For now I set the user 
up to use terminals inside of xwindows but was wondering if anyone had 
an idea of what could be going on.
               Thanks
                Linda