Thanks for the advice I tried alt control F1 which gave me a command line - and allowed me to log in to a console, however, as I was typing the commands, it then automatically went back to the graphical interface. I then loggin in using the recovery mode which allowed me to run the sudo aptitude update sudo aptitude dist-upgrade this seemed to run until it listed a syntax error with "freemed" which might be an application I tried to install in the past - it then exited back to the command line. When I rebooted, it gave me the same screen - however, it tried to go past it, the screen would flash blank then white and then back to the cream blank screen. Eventually it popped up a box with: "The greeter application appears to be crashing - attempting to use a different one" After I clicked OK, the same thing happened - eventually sticking on the blank cream screen again. Any ideas?