Ubuntu 12.10 problems and solutions

I lost a few days to work on a fresh install of 12.10 (was running 12.04).  Notes on the experience:

• It turns out a fast machine with an SSD can beat the lightdm startup, leaving the machine with a blinking cursor, which happens to look like a complete grub failure; this in turn led to re-installing grub and worse - bleh :-(  Workaround: add a few seconds pause before exec lightdm
• during installation, in the hardware scan section, modprobe I915 for Intel graphics will hang; workaround: delete i915.ko  This error was due to a regression in kernel 3.7, which was 
• installed by adding xedgers PPA to get the NVidia-current drivers... and I could not get full resolution until I added a custom xorg.conf
• cannot get to virtual consoles: hangs until in CTL-ALT-F7 back to X  UPDATE: edited /usr/share/nvidia-current/nvidia-current.grub-gfxpayload and commented out the example rule, ran update-grub-gfxpayload, rebooted.  This may make me vulnerable to other problems, but enables virtual consoles.