That’s the best description I could come up with. Basically I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop (Compaq V5000 CTO). After a series of simple updates, I no longer had the booting Ubuntu screen with the progress loading bar. Basically the Grub boot menu will load, but then the screen goes blank for roughly 2 to 3 minutes. Then the login screen for Ubuntu will finally load. After a series of quick google searches, I finally came across the answer:

It’s a resolution issue.

Here’s the fix:
1.) Open up Terminal
2.) CD to /etc/
3.) Nano usplash.conf
4.) Change the resolutions to 1024×768
5.) Save the file
6.) sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`

It looks like this is an issue mostly found on ATI based computers. So if you have an nVidia based video card, you probably won’t be able to fix this using the above technique (correct me if I’m wrong). After the fix, the boot time went from 2 to 3 minutes down to less than 30 seconds. I’d say that’s a pretty good bug fix.

EDIT 08042008
I’m pretty sure since 804 came out this is no longer an issue.