Hello Gordon, sorry your having some issues there. If, after trying PackRats solutions you are still having troubles, then maybe a different approach might do the trick. Of course I may end up catching your computer on fire too so make sure you have stuff backed up!
I'm going to try to do this through Grub. First, you should never ever never mess with this file!
Go to /etc/default/grub. Open the file named grub, in medit. (or text editor of your choice) On or around line #9 you should see EXACTLY this line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=It may or may not have some stuff after it in quotation marks. There may actually be more than one way to do this, but first try adding the following to the part inside the quotation marks;
"quiet nomodeset ATI.modeset=0"Make sure when you save /etc/default/grub file that you've just edited, that you go into a terminal window and type in sudo update-grub. (or if your using your wonderful VSIDO distro, just typing UPG will do the same thing. It is an alias included with your VSIDO install that issues the same command with less typing!) This will make the changes you just made permanent and on reboot should immediately be active in your Grub at boot up.
Now, if that doesn't work, try changing the 'ATI.modeset=0' part to 'radeon.modeset=0' and so on. Every time you edit the /etc/default/grub, make sure to remember to update-grub (or UPG). When your system boots up, if you don't want to actually make these changes to your Grub file, you can try them out first by hitting the letter 'E' when the Grub screen appears. Scroll down untill you see the above line,
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= and make the changes right there on boot. This will only work for that boot up, and will not save it in Grub. In other words, you would need to do that every time you booted. Sometimes I confuse myself when trying to help, so hopefully your not to confused! Sometimes it is harder to explain something than it actually is to do it!
This is all just basically doing what PackRat has already instructed you on just a different route to getting there!
The line 'ATI.modeset=0' is telling your computer NOT to use the radeon card (since you've removed it) and as long as you've installed the nvidia drivers correctly, hopefully will solve the boot issue. If it only half-way does the trick, perhaps re-installing the nvidia drivers using smxi would help.
Let us know, and hopefully I haven't confused anyone to badly.
