Recent Bad Updates? 3 Karmic systems Dead

[Guilden_NL]

Several days after Karmic became available, I upgraded to Karmic on three systems; one laptop and two desktops. Desktops are completely different, all hand built by me. Laptop is an HP HDX18. All ran for weeks perfectly, no problems.

This week I now have three completely dead systems.
Laptop (64 bit Karmic) complained about not being able to mount the filesystem before it locked and refused to boot. Desktop #1 (32 bit Karmic) has the infamous xserver/Gnome failure that leaves a white terminal in the upper left corner. Upon attempting to fix the Gnome desktop everything went to hell in a handbasket and now have a system so hosed, I will have to try to reinstall when I get some time. Desktop #2 (64 bit Karmic) is my main desktop, never once had a problem with Ubuntu, yesterday I was working on yet another laptop running Vista and saw that there were Karmic updates available for the desktop. I approve loading them and immediately had a panic "Will these updates kill my desktop?"

Sadly the answer is yes. Freezing on boot up, am now in the process of reloading Karmic while contemplating why Ubuntu updates now act like ******* updates!

I did a quick scan of the forums but don't see any pattern of new problems this week. Is anyone aware of anything new that caused HD or video driver problems?

It just seems strange that three systems that never had problems with Ubuntu turn into paperweights within two days of each other.
I'll muddle through and get them back in service, but will be very reluctant to update until I am very sure that there isn't a problem lurking. Pretty much the same mode I run in with *******.

[Guilden_NL]

An update, it seems that the latest kernel update magically fixed plenty of people's video problems, and it is smelling like it may have caused just as many new problems. Note that the two desktops AND the HP HDX18 have NVidia graphic cards. I can't say that the HP laptop seemed to have any video issues before the disk probs started, but it was within a day of the kernel update.

Hmmmm.