Solved! Cant get livecd past video settings selection

Little background, Im normally a windows guy, but lately have become interested in other OS's and just (yesterday evening) intalled Ubuntu on a spare PC.  So far I love it.

Ive had an issue with my regular home family PC due to my failure to pay attention when loading it (Windows XP pro) and made C: too small, D: just had some junk on it that I moved to an additional 250 Gb drive i bought, so what I want to do is kill D: and give all that space back to C:.  Well I did a test on a spare laptop today with the gparted 0.3.4-6 livecd i just burned and all went perfectly, but... I got home and popped the cd in got all the way through where you choose the screen resolution then I just get junk, looks like white noise on a tv, i can see a rectangle of white noise under all of it and it responds to mouse movement but I cant get the gui to load, the only way out of it is a hard restart.  I have tried every possible screen setting, I also tried choosing both ATI and ATI Radeon and still get the same thing, occasionally with my monitor giving an out of bounds error.

Help!  The video card is an ATI Radeon Express 200 and it in a compaq desktop.  I dont know anything about linux commands (although I hope to with time).  I cant really see anyplace where I could enter any commands anyway.

Any ideas?  Did I just do something dumb?

Thanks for looking!