Thanks to everyone for the replies. I couldn't catch the error message because
it scrolled continuously and could not be stopped until I did a forced shutdown.

The error did not show up for several minutes, during which time the ubunto
splash (can I call it that in linux?) screen showed no indication of a problem.

The 32 bit linux 10.04 LTS loaded with no apparent problems so I'll probably
just go back to it. Then I'll try the i386 version of VB - probably Monday.