Hi. Thanks to everyone for suggestions on how to diagnose the problem. It
might well be something to do with PAE or UEFI, or maybe his processor is
an i486. I'll see him tomorrow and try to figure it out, but I don't want
to devote too much time and effort to this...just one more good reason for
him to use Refracta, which seems to boot everything!

On my computer, I've gotten Refracta to do everything I need, with the
exception of typing in Chinese (I live in Taiwan, remember). Actually, I
can type Chinese just fine in Refracta by using Emacs, but I'm thinking
that for non-Emacs users, it would be good if I could get one of the
Chinese input daemons working (ie scim, ibus or gcin) but that's an issue
for another day.

Again, thanks for all the help. I'm going to bed (almost midnight in my
time zone).

cheers,
Robert