It is not the cd. I am wondering a few things though. Is it normal that during initialization I see something like "init: version 2.78" even though I have 3.9? Also, the errors seem to be rather inconsistent. Even with the same codes, I'll get varying results. I even got past the Xserver problem once, to the spaceman screen where KDE began to load, the desktop looked good, and I thought I was good, and then KDE failed and the screen went black. Then with the same codes, on the next boot, I got xserver errors again. Sometimes I get the gray screen, sometimes not, and I can properly shut down. What is the deal?