If you have a cd /dvd cleaner run it and try the live cd again. If you have 
the space, install virtualbox and make the downloaded iso be the cd/dvd 
device in a new vm. The reason I am saying that is because my experience has 
been totally different. I installed it on a vm on the desktop and in a stand 
alone partition on my laptop. After doing the small dance to get synaptic gui 
running, the next issue i found has something to do with permissions and/or 
hal, which i thought was gone, but apparently isn't. I get a lot of "file 
doesn't exist" on cd / dvd /usb mounts.  To install the guest additions or 
access a usb stick i have to create a directory, mount the device on the 
directory and access it as sudo or su. On the positive side, the 64gb sd chip 
from my camera can bee seen now, it can not be accessed in my workhorse 64 
bit wheezy running on the same hardware.
on the vm i installed chrome, netflix plays natively now, installed 
googleearth ( ver 6.03 using googleearth package, the latest version has the 
panoramio pics blank but runs otherwise), kmail was just copied over from 
the "standard" os and works fine, skype seems to be fine, libre office seems 
fine, overall everything i tried seems to work very nice.
now two questions: is the hal thing or permissions that are the problem with 
external media, and, is there going to be a 64 bit live cd? 
keep up the good work:)
dimitris

oh, and thanks and kudos for addressing the grub install issue so quickly:)

On Saturday 29 November 2014 02:04:49 am Baron wrote:
> Hi Guys, David,
>
> I've downloaded and burnt a CD from exegnu-jessv-20141125.iso.  Its
> fine, checksum matches.  So I thought that I would try it as a live
> CD on this, my usual machine.
>
> The CD boots up as I would expect except for a couple of things.
> After all the boot process, I'm left with a text screen with a list
> of boot processes, which never finishes.  The last item refers to
> IPV6 and a blank line.  Pressing enter gives me a prompt at which if
> I enter "startx"  takes me to a totally black screen.  I minute later
> I get the start screen for "exegnu" as a panel in the top left corner
> of the screen.  After this screen has finished I'm left with the
> normal taskbar at the bottom and a totally black background.
>
> I cannot get anything from any mouse button on this background, I can
> however access items from the normal menu and the icons on the
> taskbar.  Locating the screen menu items, whilst it allows me to go
> through the settings, does nothing.  Curiously the "Scan rate" box
> shows zero and is not changable.
>
> Everything else seems to function as I would expect.
>
> The machine is a 3Ghz intel P4 dual core, 1.5Gb ram, on board 64Mb SIS
> 661 Graphics,  SIS 661FX chipset, SIS 7012 sound,  SIS 900 Ethernet.
>
> HTH.