White screen following 12.04 clean install

[aeroflotsam]

I really need help with this one..... First it is a clean install of 12.04 on a Dell 5160 laptop. I'm using a known good CD which I've used before on other machines. The live CD feature works well as long as I hit F6 and specify "nomodeset" at the beginning of the session. Everything in a live CD session works perfectly! Now for the bad news....

During installation all of the screens are perfectly readable and remain as such until the point where it is time to reset the computer. The machine boots into a white screen with the top menu bar OK but with a pink stripe down the left side where the 2D Unity icons should be. Everything to the right is white. Oddly enough the dash home lens works perfectly and all of the icons are as normal as is the background color. If I select anything from the lens it reverts to a white screen and the selected item now becomes invisible. I tried the terminal from the lens and typed the word "exit" blindly on the white screen and the terminal program closed. Moving the mouse down the Unity bar area reveals black boxes containing the names of what the icons represent but of course no icons.

Here's one last odd thing: If I right click on that cursed white background the box comes up offering to "Create New Folder, Create New Document.... etc. just as you'd expect it to. I created a folder which was invisible on the desktop but showed up in the dash home lens as a recent document.......

My processor is a Pentium 4 and the video controller is Nvidia GeForce GO5200

I sure hope someone can help me out with this one and that I've given enough information.

Thanks

[mörgæs]

... video controller is Nvidia GeForce GO5200...

With this one I would go for a fresh install of X/Lubuntu, at least for comparison. I have an almost-similar FX5200 on one of my computers, and running Ubuntu on this card is a pain.

[aeroflotsam]

Thank you so much for your reply. I'm not at all familiar with any of the other variants of Ubuntu but I've been very happy with the performance and functionality of Ubuntu in general. I tried everything I could think of to get 12.04 into this machine but to no avail. I even loaded 11.04 which worked under Gnome but was unable to use the update manager or software center for some reason. Strangely enough the machine runs Windows XP perfectly so a return to that might be an option.
Many thanks again and I'll take a look at Lubuntu.