Following Richard's advice, I edited the conf file and did an update- initramfs. 1024x768 looks awful with the images wrapping around etc., but it does work. 1280x1024 and 1400x1050 (worth a shot...) do the same.
800x600 doesn't wrap but has awful black horizontal bands. It looks the nicest of them so that is what I have left it set to. Needless to say that Dapper's splash worked fine. While none of those things are great, they are not really the subject of this bug report. I can therefore confirm that manually editing usplash.conf and updating initramfs seems to remedy the immediate problem. As an aside, is a bug that has 19 duplicates and at least 49 people watching changes really still "low" importance? -- usplash resolution error in boot and halt https://launchpad.net/bugs/60621 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs