The screen capture contains a grey blip in the bottom left corner.
This actually contains two blinking characters in bright white. The
characters appear to be ASCII 144 (0x90).
I'm not passing any strange parameters to the kernel, just "root=/dev/hda2 ro".
I tried reinstalling; it didn't help. Let me know what else I should try.
Linux 2.6.22 and 2.6.23 work fine on the same VM. (With the exception
of bug 433815, of course.)