I ran into a similar issue with a black screen in Ubuntu, seemingly a result of driver issues too. It turns out the normal installation wasn't partitioning enough space for it to run in (I installed it alongside Windows 7). I had to manually partition the disk to give it ample room. Once I did that, everything ran just fine. Along the way I encountered a lot of advice similar to what you did, and it set me back several hours before I realized what the actual cause was.