ThinkPad freezing after hw update?

[Jesse Sheidlower <jester@panix.com>]

I have a two-year-old ThinkPad T60. It recently developed some
screen problems--the display was losing colors, and finally
started to die completely, going to black shortly after
startup--so I sent it back for a warranty repair. I pulled the
hard drive before I shipped it.

It's back now, but the machine is now locking up hard at
various points in the boot process. The first few times it
froze at "Setting the system clock"; then at "Activing
swapfile swap". Now it is booting all the way and letting me
log into Gnome, but then locks up soon after. Needless to say,
it was working fine (aside from the screen) before the repair.

They included a note saying that they had also upgraded the
BIOS and embedded controller--to 2.23 and 1.07 respectively.

I'm running Debian unstable, kernel 2.6.29-2-686.

I'd be very grateful for any suggestion about what might have
caused this, and for how to evaluate and fix it.

Thanks.

Jesse Sheidlower