Woah! I think I can reproduce this!
I was trying to manually install Nvidia drivers to see how that would go! But didn't get that far. Only got as far as creating a file in /etc/modprobe.d to disable nouveau, with contents:
```
blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
```
Once that is in place, I get the regular freezes on startup (as above). I've not even installed any nvidia packages.
I'm going to try just removing the nouveau packages entirely, see if that does anything.
mark