after the hardware detection phase, during the X startup, I keep getting the dredded "black screen of death"

my hardware:

Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0 ghz) processor
Asus N8V-VM motherboard
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS PCI-E video card

I have tried booting with cheatcodes

"knoppix xserver=XFree86"
"knoppix xserver=XF86_SVGA"
"knoppix xmodule=nv"
"knoppix screen=1024x768"
"knoppix fb1024x768"

nothing I try seems to be working. Still black screen of death. mouse don't even come up, but yet is detected during hw detection. besides, my other 3 computers on the same KVM switch, all run the same knoppix CD just fine..

I'm thinking its probably the PCI-E video card, but how would I get around this?
the hw detection detects an AGP bridge, which isn't even right, the motherboard doesn't even have an AGP slot to begin with. its got a PCI-E x1 slot, and PCI-E x16 slot. The x1 slot isn't being used, the x16 is being used by the video card.

any suggestions as to what I can try?

am using the Knoppix DVD version 5.1.1
I tried the CD version, same problem. tried a version 3 and version 4 series knoppix CD too, same problem.

I know its not a bad DVD image, because the same DVD works fine on all my other computers, even those connected to the same KVM switch, so if its not hardware related, I don't know what it could be.

thanks