All other messages in that log are innocuous and can be ignored. Unfortunately the log does not indicate why the freeze occurs. Perhaps it could be caused by PAM? Can you verify the temporary "freeze" with the VT login console?

Long story short. By process of elimaination and clue piecing together from various snippets from old mailing lists and threads dating back, I finally pieced the answer together.

A few years back I bought three Samsung spinpoint f1 hard drives as spare / backup (the retailer at the time did a great deal) I kept these nicely stored and forgot them. Couple of months ago I needed to shuffle things about and rebuild a desktop tower.....

It turns out there was a firmware issue on some of those drives. It also turns out that two or three people on linux forums and mailing lists were complaining about said Samsung drives and had similar 'quirky' happennings to me. So I slotted the other two (old but new, and unused) Samsung drives in and installed Kubuntu and Chakra (on both drives) and they work fine. Login freeze - gone.

So in my case I'm pretty much sure that's what's gone on.

Interesting, especially that this only happened at the login screen.

Good to hear it is solved in any case.

Ah. The login freeze was the only constant symptom that happened across both Kubuntu and Chakra, hence me thinking it was a kde issue. Chakra was fine on the very first install, as was Kubuntu, it was only on a reboot that the login freeze occurred and stayed on both.

But Chakra then started to develop a wider boot stall issue, spat a few error messages during boot up and added an extra 30 seconds or so till I got to the login freeze. Obviously investigated the error messages and did routine hardware tests, sata cable changes / check bios / thorough drive scans, etc. Scans came back clean. But that's when I started looking further afield remembering the comparative age of the drive.

There was one post in particular that identified my drive, with similar problems (single post, no answers). Bought at roughly the same time and his avatar located him very near to me. Chances are he more than likely bought his drive from the same large (popular) online tech retailer that I did. So I started probing the drives history. That's when I discovered the firmware issue(s). Never even occurred to me after all that time.