[runtime]

Unfortunately Nvidia's GeForce 6150 integrated chipset doesn't appear to support the use of high-resolution splash screens while booting (at least not inconjunction with my particular display).

The screen corruption I observed while loading is almost certainly due to the current xbmc-splash.so not supporting 640x480. The closest match is the 1024x768 usplash image which is being used by XBMC Live while the video resolution is set to 640x480; naturally the image becomes distorted.

If the next Live CD contains a usplash 'theme' supporting 640x480 (in addition to the many other resolutions it already supports) I'm fairly certain it'll solve the problem (this one supports 640x480 and looks particularly nice imho).

[lcapriotti]

640x480 was included in beta1, but 1024x768 was specified in /etc/usplash.conf. I will try to revert to 800x600 in (upcoming) bugfix release.
BTW, that theme is the one used in Live

[runtime]

My bad, of course you're right! It was the error message 'usplash: no usable theme found for resolution 640x480' that confused me. Ironically I found that one of the png files in the theme I was using was labelled 640x480 but was in fact 800x600 (!)

Sadly this wasn't the only problem. For whatever reason it seems that usplash doesn't detect the 640x480 resolution mode available on my system. Even if I specify it in the usplash.conf file (within initrd0.img).

However the good news (for me!) is that if you force usplash to use 1024x768 using the conf file, it will select the 1024x768 theme and output it to whatever screen resolution you've specified using the GRUB kernel switch (-vga). So with a few modifications to the theme, I can now get a decent looking splash screen

The screen 'corruption' that I referred to earlier is actually usplash trying to render an empty text box - it just looks very weird because the coordinates are all wrong due to usplash trying to output a 1024x768 theme on a 640x480 screen. A few code tweaks sorted it out.