Okay... I fiddled with it a little bit. Here's what I have:

I can boot up fine. well, sort of. Something happened when I put a new stick of memory in, if you saw my previous post... (i put my old memory back in, though)

It's almost like init is having trouble loading stuff... like, i can get it up and running okay. My mixer (aumix) settings are reset to zero across the board. I'm not sure what other wierd things are going on... haven't messed with it fully.

Okay, so I can boot up, log into X (gnome), and get things working. but whenever I log out, the kernel freezes up. I reboot manually. It boots up... and for some reason, it has trouble loading modules for (at least) my pci devices. my netcards don't work (eth0, 1) and lo doesn't load. My soundcard doesn't work either. I haven't messed with my usb... i'm sort of thinking it has something to do with hotplug (2.6.6, btw). anyway, if i have to manually reboot, it won't let me log into gnome, only fluxbox. It still crashes whenever i exit the wm.

what I really want to know is first of all, how to log the entire boot sequence.

secondly, any insight into why the x server would crash when i try to exit? (btw, if I kill the process manually, it doesn't lock)

fenderman11111; http:www.ibilio.org/mdw/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO table of contents. check all sections ,expand them to find solutions or at least tips
for futher howto.