I made a Live USB drive according to the instructions here; I am able to load the Live Ubuntu menu (just before booting into "Try Ubuntu" or "Install Ubuntu", but when I try to boot either of those, I get the following error:
I tried enabling all the special features (like "noapic"), but with no luck. I checked the BIOS, but it doesn't seem like anything there is askew - I tried changing some settings that might be relevant anyways (obscure features enable/disable), but nothing thus far has worked.

The motherboard is an MSI B75MA-E33.
Any help would be appreciated.

I just dd'ed the image to my USB drive and at least "Try" is working. (Note: No persistent installation. All data on the drive will be lost.)

I got past the initial kernel panic with a BIOS update.

Now, my issue is a crash when the installer is almost finished. Sometimes it kernel panics, sometimes it doesn't. But it never completes successfully, and always (eventually) drops to the CLI with some cryptic messages.

Never in my life have I had so much trouble with Ubuntu. Heck, even Slackware was more user-friendly than this. Tried to install Fedora; it won't let me install without swap space. Next is Debian.

Edit: Debian and CentOS both fail with kernel panics, too.

I was convinced it was something with the BIOS/UEFI settings. Turns out I was wrong: it was bad RAM. Swapped for known-good RAM, and all problems went away. Once up-and-running, tried the bad RAM again; issues returned.