I suspect a bad interaction with some device on your machine.  I think
you should try booting a very minimal kernel and then adding devices,
one by one, until you find it.  INSTALL_TINY or GENERIC_TINY might be a
good starting point.

The other, completely different approach, is to boot GENERIC.MPACPI,
since there have been reports of machines that won't boot without ACPI
support active.