System freeze-up

[Moltke]

What I am saying is I did hit CTRL+ALT+F1 and I did NOT get the terminal.  The cursor disappeared and that was it.  I had to reboot.

Hmmm ... Well, try with Ctrl + Alt + F3 you have 6 TTYs to open from F1-F6. Maybe F1 was busy. However, like I said, give it a few seconds for the TTY to start, just don't reboot right away. If you can't do that, open a file manager, navigate to /var/log/, locate the messages file and copy it to your /home directory, and attach the file in your reply.