Loading screen only appears for part of boot

[mittfh]

(Following Doktor's advice, splitting original post into one for each niggle)

The default boot loading screen (Plymouth? Shows the cauldron then presumably is supposed to show the five bubbles as a progress indicator) gets as far as one bubble, then the display blanks for about 10s until the login screen loads (originally with gdm, now with slim). Since the login screen is on tty2 and switching to tty1 (i.e. Ctrl+Alt+F1) shows a completed cauldron and bubbles, I'm guessing that at the single bubble stage, the system starts preparing to load the login screen and switches to that tty. Is there any way of keeping it on tty1 until the login screen's ready?

(boot.log attached, in case that proves useful...)

[doktor5000]

If you want to get those issues solved, please open up seperate threads for each issue.