Everything was going great, I installed Ubuntu 9.04 when it came out, and then I tried to “improve” the graphics.  I don’t remember what I did, but I ended up with it always booting into a frozen video, with hash garbage  on the screen.  Tonight, I did a google search for “Ubuntu fix for no video on boot” and found a reference to removing the following package xorg-driver-fglrx, well that was the magic incantation.  It worked.  And everything is great again.

Boot into Recovery mode, drop down into a root console and type apt-get remove –purge xorg-driver-fglrx then reboot, or type init 5 to get into multi-user mode.  Everything should be back to normal.