Weird things after 11.04 install

[Dodge2461]

I am using a Aopen motherboard, a pentium 4 at 2.4ghz, and a 40 gig hard drive and a DVD drive. So I installed it and everything seemed to go fine until it told me to remove the installation media and press enter. It showed me the kernel and the words but no purple screen. Then the desktop looked out of whak and I'm stooped. My dad has another disc and we're going to try that. We are running the same hardware. I am running it alongside windows xp and they are divided equally. I am not connected to the Internet be cause me and my dad share a network.

[jerrrys]

go to System>preferences>monitors and see if you are set up correct. also, what kind of video do you have.

[2F4U]

Just to be clear, can you login to the desktop or not? The fact that things may not look the way you are used to may be due to graphics drivers. If this is Ubuntu, then Unity places a higher demand on graphics drivers than previous versions. I don't know your graphics card, but if it is ATI or nVidia, you could try to use the proprietary graphics drivers.
If this option is not available to you, then maybe another flavour of Ubuntu, for example Xubuntu, may be better suited.