As a quick explanation, I bought a Ubuntu-preloaded laptop from Dell. After a few weeks of use, I ended up switching hard drives with a friend, and got a smaller drive than the one I had. Using some magic, all the data I had on my drive was ghosted and then placed back onto the new, smaller drive.

To my utter surprise, everything loaded. During the first boot up process after the procedure, Ubuntu did a drive check because of some mismatch, said it fixed some bad blocks and moved on. The laptop came up fine after that.

There seems to be one problem, though, and it has me stumped. If I press the log out button as soon as my desktop comes up after booting, nothing happens at first. Other programs load fine, and I can honestly go on to check mail and surf the web. About four-five minutes later, the screen with the different log out options will finally come up. After wards, the button works normally. Also, if I wait five minutes and not press the log out button, then it will also work fine.

It's as if for about five minutes after bootup something else runs that won't allow for that logout box to come up, but does not affect any other program (tested with Openoffice, tbird, and firefox).

Any ideas how I could see what's going on?

Er: Using Feisty Fawn, fully updated as of about a week ago.

I'm not sure about this but try it..
When you press the logout button. Click Ctrl+Alt+F1 and read if something is going on tty1. Tell me if this works.

Nothing unusual except these three lines (although they look to be part of the start up).
I have to mention that sda5 is actually my swap partition, so I have no idea why it's looking for a boot image in there, but oh well.

Otherwise, nothing.

Is there a way to see what exactly happens at boot time when normally there's the Ubuntu screen with a line scrolling across it? Like something that would let me see, line by line, what is actually loading.

Edit: Er never mind, it's ALT+F3