I am really glad that I did not upgrade to SP3. Two of my colleagues with laptops exactly like mine, recently had their systems imaged to an earlier state---this included Automatic Updates. My warnings of what could happen, were actually premonitions of what did happen. Both their computers would boot to a black screen. One of them had the Ultimate Boot Disc, but this was useless, except confirmed my suspicion that it was SP3 on their systems.
In short we had to use a BIOS option to search for hard drive errors, which seemed to fix whatever problems were also having before we could install Kubuntu.
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click to show Here is the real rub that none of us could figure out. We tried initializing the disc with random data (using DBAN), and an error would occur at the exact same time every time we tried this. There is no reason why that should happen; I've initialized my hard drive before applying an older image and never received this problem. I keep a handy Kubuntu disc at all times, so we tried to install that. Seemed like a peachy clean install. Reboot, see GRUB booting, then it black screens.
I search through the BIOS and find a hard drive checker option in there. I run that, and sure enough, an error occurs at the exact same percent complete mark. Being frustrated, I just start hitting the power button repeatedly... it restarts a few times... but then there is Kubuntu. No clue, no reason, maybe the hard drive checker fixed something somewhere... we don't know, nothing we did should have fixed anything.