Well, this is embarrassing. Only the other day I was saying "no-one ever fails with Mint" and now I can't get Mint 17 to work!

This computer doesn't have hardware graphics acceleration: I just get graphics off my SiS 741 Northbridge.

The Mint live disk ran perfectly, but when I rebooted xorg kept crashing. Running "inxi -SGx" showed that the sis driver had failed. I rebooted and used "xforcevesa". I still had no graphics and "inxi -SGx" showed that the vesa driver hadn't loaded. I tried removing the sis driver to see if that would encourage the vesa one to load, but it didn't. I tried removing xserver-xorg-video-modesetting, as advised on the Mint forum, and starting again, but that didn't work.

I presume that the sis driver is broken, but why won't the vesa one load: presumably it was what was in use with the live disk?

Not sure what to tell you. I have a backed up /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in my pastebin for a 23 inch monitor when my
Ubuntu 14.04 minimal install did not wanna play with the noevau open source video driver and the kernel.

Running inxi would give scattered lines across my screen and freeze up the desktop (I run icewm)

So that vesa backup was what I used till I got my Nvidia driver installed.

You are welcome to it if you can use it. Just name it xorg.conf and slip it into /etc/X11 and cross your fingers.

http://pastebin.com/J7U0Hizw

A fresh look at the live disk shows that it's using the SiS diver, so presumably there's no fault. Could it have been damaged (how?) during installation? I could try reinstalling. But first I'll try creating an xorg.conf and see what happens.

It's ironic that I successfully installed Lubuntu last week, despite Ubuntu's poor track record with older hardware.

Well, solved at last. I got the vesa driver running using xorg.conf, but that didn't help. So, on the principle of "change everything until you find the culprit", I replaced the display manager, changing mdm to xdm, and that cured the problem. So why did inxi say that the SiS driver had failed when it was the display manager? Mint makes the best of a bad job, but if you want a decent distro you need to start with Red Hat, Slackware, or Debian Stable.