Binary package hint: usplash
I installed from kubuntu-7.10-beta-alternate this AM, then immediately upgraded to whatever state is on the mirrors.
On all Intel video chips that I've used (i810, i815, 845G), none of the common framebuffer vga= modes (785, 788, 791, 0x31a, etc.) work. The only functional mode I've found other than normal 80x25 is 0x120, which is 25 row by 132 column. Setting splash=0 and vga=0x120 on the kernel lines in menu.lst causes bootup video to initialize correctly, but after usplash finishes and I return to any of the consoles from X, the characters on screen have been reset to the 80x25 size, but are laid out as if there were still 25 rows of 132 columns, with chars >80 spilling onto subsequent rows, and new rows appended where previous rows end. As a result, the consoles are unusable. The last rows and columns seem to be off the bottom of the screen. The only fixes I have found are suffering to keep 80x25, or apt-get remove usplash. I did the latter before booting after the upgrade, so don't know if a newer version than 0.5-5 might have behaved differently.
Upstream kernel bug http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7513 might be related.
I've since determined that with 845G a BIOS upgrade may provide support for standard framebuffer vga= modes.