Hi, I have dabbled with a couple versions of Mint and promised that I would install and go with it ... one day. So, I had the opportunity to build a new computer in an old case and 'one day' has arrived. I have a HDD with three partitions, with Win XP Pro installed, so downloaded Unetbootin on my Win 7 machine and created a bootable USB stick with Mint 12 to use on the new build. I get the boot menu and then it hangs on ...
0.722897[<c1533b7e>]kernel_thread_helper +0x6/0x10.
I was going to do a hard drive instal, but clearly have done something wrong. But WHAT.
Help please

Interesting, when I googled the error you show I find a couple links, one is here, and it seems to point to possible hardware issue. Have you tried booting another computer with the stick just to check it?

Did you verify the downloaded image? Maybe a bad/corrupted download?