Comment 12 for bug 684863

> FailsafeX does appear to work.

If you manually adjust your boot arguments so that you are booting with both 'single' and 'splash' on the kernel commandline (and optionally, booting without 'quiet' set), are you able to successfully boot to the single user menu? If you are, and youselect failsafe X at that point, does X come up?