[precise] plymouth won't stop

[Mozai]

Since upgrading to 12.04, plymouth's oscillating "progress bar" doesn't stop after Xserver is started. This causes some animated noise near the top of the screen. When I switch to the text console from the console hosting X (ie. with Ctrl-Alt-F1) the progress bar is whole, and still oscillating.

If I use `sudo -- pkill -HUP -f plymouth` the oscillation stops, but the image of the "progress bar" remains. The image vanishes upon switching to another console.

I believe plymouth should not show this animated "progress bar" once the computer finishes booting and is ready to accept user authentication. I believe plymouth should not cause graphical noise in the X session.

Could someone help me diagnose and fix plymouth's misbehaviour?

[Mozai]

Alternately, could someone tell me how to discard plymouth completely? Doing 'sudo aptitude remove plymouth' throws a frightening number of warning messages. I would really rather see the boot messages from the init/startup scripts showing me status and error messages. With plymouth, if something goes wrong, all I see is the "progress bar" stop, but I have no idea what happened because the pretty splash picture is all I see.

I already tried setting
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nosplash noplymouth"
in /etc/default/grub and rebuilding the grub config with
grub-mkconfig >/boot/grub/grub.cfg
but I'm still getting plymouth's splash screen obscuring any status messages, and the progress-bar noise invading my X sessions.