It could be a video recognition problem, I would try loading debian xfce
version myself. Go to www.debian.org and your closest mirror, you will find
the iso near the bottom of the cd iso list. There is no reason that once you
have installed debian that you can't change to xubuntu by changing the
repositories. It might help to try and figure out what the video card is on
your laptop, then look up some drivers for it, if that is the problem. If the
worst comes to the worst try installing from a net install cd of debian and
choose your desktop version from there.

Thanks for the help, took your advice and that seemed to take care of
the problem.

On my HP Compaq laptop dual core 64bit, the same thing happened, I
waited a few seconds, got up to get a drink of water, looked back, it
was loading, it just took quite a while to show up, are you waiting
long enough for it to load, it took me quite a while, but is working
super.

I've waited for almost 10 minutes once with nothing happening, however
Debian with xcfe is working just fine so I'm thinking of just leaving
it like that for now.