USB install halts after login

[uberben]

I have a computer connected to my TV that had a really loud hard drive so I went out and bought an 8 gb USB drive. I had 8.04 Ubuntu installed on the hard drive and all worked fine. I removed the hard drive and attached the USB drive to the computer and installed Ubuntu onto the USB drive using the same install cd I used to install to the hard drive. The installation seemed to take longer, which was tolerable, but when I restarted the machine after the install, it would boot up to the login screen and let me enter my username and password, but would then just stay on screen consisting of my cursor and the light brown default background colour. The mouse can still be moved and the screen saver still activates (only sends screen to black), but nothing else seems to work. I tried installing again with a different install CD (this time the alternate) and had the exact same issue. Does anyone have any suggestions? Can anyone point me to another forum post regarding a similar issue? I looked around a little but could not find much.

Thanks,

Ben

[uberben]

bump

[uberben]

Any ideas? Anyone?

I realized that I can still get a command line with the Ctrl+Alt+F2 and so I am running updates through that in hopes of getting it working. Its taken a few hours so far and ever few lines it prints something like "usb 1-2: device descriptor read/64, error -62". Does anyone have any clues as to what might be my issue?