Failed start-up after upgrading to 10.04

[Roger Houghton]

I have been using Gibbon on an IBM thinkpad R50e. On Tuesday morning update manager had "Try 10.04" across the top and a big "Install" button next to it. After four hours, the automated install process reached 'restart.' The computer shut down and restarted; the drive operated for 20 seconds; the word 'ubuntu appeared in white on a black screen with five red stars underrneath; two seconds later it disappeared; the drive ceased driving and nothing further happened. After 30 minutes I switched off and on. Again 20 seconds of hard disk driving, five more red stars and then nothing.

I looked at the code loading. A synaptics touchpad (not installed on this notebook) was found missing and did not install.
Then:
write to /sys/class/backlight/thinkpad_screen/brightness for backlight control failed: invalid argument.
This repeated eight times then:
libhal.c 3483 :error unsubscribing to signals, error=connection is closed.

[Roger Houghton (roger-houghton)]

I should add that after the "connection is closed" line there was a note:

This is normally due to a bug in some application using the D-Bus library.

Excuse me for the oversight.

[Roger Houghton (roger-houghton)]

Excuse me, I am ignorant of the procedure in Launchpad.

Should I wait for the code to cure my bug or should I copy-off my /home directory and re-format the drive and reinstall?

If the latter, how do I do that please?