[Nottingham] Broken Kubuntu during feisty to gutsy upgrade

[daveluff]

Hi Folks,

I'm posting this from Thunderbird on Windows, due to a breakage of 
Kubuntu whilst following the instructions on the website for upgrading 
from feisty to gustsy.  The upgrade didn't go completely smoothly - 
Adept crashed a couple of times, I had to do some manual dpkg stuff, but 
eventually it rebooted into a different looking KDM login screen. 

Unfortunately, it has completely lost all contact with the keyboard, 
both in normal boot and safe mode boot.  Obviously the keyboard works, 
since it selects the OS in the grub screen OK, but somewhere during the 
text output during the Linux boot, the num-lock light goes out, and 
that's it - it's pretty hard to find out what's happened without the 
keyboard - I can't even log in to read the logs!

Anyway, I have an old live CD or two I can boot from to try and sort it 
out, but what should I be looking for?  I've really got no idea where to 
start, anyone got any suggestions?

Cheers - Dave