I went back through older emails and found that link, so I got HPCBoot 
Build 12, thanks :) Not sure if it's related, but that seems to have taken 
care of the motd hang, so your guess is as good as mine on that one.

I'll have to try the "kill x from within x" trick , but first I think I 
have to reinstall X... At one point when X gav eme the "failed to read 
from keyboard" error it appeared to hang, so I had to hard reset the 
machine and I think it screwed something up on the filesystem because now 
when I start X I get the grey screen with the X cursor, but then I get 
some font errors (Even thought he fonts are there) and if I try to bring 
up anything in X it bombs out to a console...sometimes it hangs sometimes 
it doesn't... I'll try reinstalling the Xfonts packages and see if that 
fixes it.

This is fun!:)

Thanks again
Marc