Hi there! My first post on here so forgive me if I may have missed a solution for this problem.

I've been using Kubuntu on an Acer Aspire 5315 since February and after a few re-installs and a fair amount of tinkering, I seem to have everything I have in working order.

Just one small (and believe me, it's pretty insignificant on the scheme of things) issue I've experienced is the lack of a boot screen. I get the BIOS startup, then a "lit" black screen, then a completely black screen and then what looks to be an out-of-sync "5 dots" screen. After that, the KDE initialisation screen pops up as normal. The live CD booted up fine, as did the Ubuntu install (With Unity) prior to that.

My acer was upgraded from a Celeron 550 to a Core2 DUO last year and memory upped to 1GB. Other than that it is as standard.

Can anyone give me a clue as to where I'd start poking around without damaging too much?

Thanks in advance.

Sounds like the appropriate boot splash is not operating correctly.
Do you see the Grub menu to select the system to boot?