Comment 18 for bug 493834

The evidence seems to be more and more pointing to usplash. On the usplash debugging wiki (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingUsplash) there are some good hints. First, if you are able to boot without splash and then change to a VT and run usplash manually, then you could (or do that before) log in from the second machine and try to gather more information (strace, can you kill it, ...). The other thing (if you happen to have a 32 life CD lying around (I think I saw the dmesgs were from 64bit installs), you could compare its behavior against your install.