He clocked his proc back down to stock and reseated his RAM, but he says it still won't boot.

Just out of curiosity, how long do your computers stay at this screen while booting live?






edit: added a word

On the computers I've used it on I'd guess that the time spent on that screen varied between 5-20 seconds.

That's from the cd? Not installed?

We left it go for about 10 minutes, then turned off the comp. When I get some free time I'll go over and help him mess with some boot options.

That's off a live cd (32bit Dapper Shipit disk).

I know that gnome has a couple of failsafe sessions (like command line and failsafe gnome) that you can run normally if you have problems, but I'm not sure how you'd get to them on a live cd because it bypasses the login screen.

I have no idea what the problem is that you are having, so my only suggestion is to make a post on an official ubuntu forum and ask for help from them. They'll probably have you find out some specific information via the command line, and diagnose the problem quicker than we can (not to say that we aren't 1337 enough).

Either that, or try unplugging everything that's not necessary and running with the bare minimum.

Now that I think of it, it's possible that one of the default startup programs is what's freezing up. Maybe you can manually edit what starts up in the command line and then boot gnome. Eh, I don't know. I'm sorry to hear about your problem.