Thanks for your help, I am going to try to get Knoppix. I ran Gnoppix on 2 other computers and they didn't have a problem with it at all. I think it's the keyboard on this notebook that is causing the problem, it is USB and it may not have initialized the drivers correctly when it started up. I am going to try another keyboard to see if that helps, but all in all, I can't carry around a 2nd keyboard with my notebook, just to boot into linux with.
Hopefully, I'll find more cheat-codes for the command line startup that may help to fix the keyboard issue.
-SF