17.1 installed with Xserver nouveau driver despite the Nvidia being the recommended driver. As reported changed to Nvidia with the same outcome, crash on boot up unless in recovery mode. Then noticed there was a Nvidia update, changed to this and everything is tickety boo!
Another thing I would mention is that the software manager is set to search in the packages summary(slower search). So slow it could not be observed to search! Changed preferences to search as type and it now works fine. It would appear that my problems are solved, well for now anyway. Thanks for all help and suggestions.

Hi Fred Caro, that's a better question than it first appears.Being carried away with getting 17.1 to operate, I decided to install it as the sole operating system. The problem with this is that you do not get the option to boot in recovery mode, hence it won't boot at all until the drivers are changed. Had to install another operating system alongside (in this case 17 as I happened to have it on DVD) so that you get several options at boot.

Please note, if mint,or Ubuntu, are installed on their own you can still boot into the recovery mode by holding down the shift key at boot time, it will give some more options incuding 'advanced options', choose that to see 'recovery'.

Fred.

Thanks again Fred! That helps.
Peter

I have Mint 17.3 installed from an OSDISC USB drive. Sometimes on boot a white square shows top left of screen which continues to be visible through other software. A simple 'Log out' and 'Log in' corrects the problem . Can someone steer me towards a proper solution ?

Hi Graham,
I think the white spot got covered on page 1 of this thread. Can't remember how it was done now, but it must be fairly straight forward because I solved it!