The yummy looking kernel patch
 

You know that real nice looking grey kernel patch that hides what the kernel is really doing on first bookup - how do you get that back ?

Do you mean the GUI splash-ish screen? You need to be booting straight to run level 5, and have "rhgb" in your kernel line in grub.conf.

If you have that running, and you are just talking about the details, click the "hide details" at the top-left, I think it is.

sorry, above post was posted rather late at nite, sorry for sounding like a n00b ..

how do I check what runlevel im booting into ?

It's in your /etc/inittab . There's a section of comments telling which is which.

Its weird, it sometimes comes up on boot, and sometimes it doesnt.