gerald_clark - thank you, oddly enough, running xsetup appears to have done nothing, or if it did, it was very very fast and very silent. I do get a GUI at startup though, so that's a step in the right direction. I will absolutely try and read through the book you mentioned.
imaad - HDD, although I can see it's doing the slow-device wait regardless...I wonder how I'd get it to not do that, but it doesn't matter too much at the moment. I installed Xvesa and Xprogs by gerald_clark's advice and now I get a GUI at start up. If memory serves...Xvesa works on some hardware, Xorg works on some other hardware, you just have to find which works for your specific case, right? I *think* my dev laptop has an intel x3100 graphics adapter.
Regardless, my issue is just about resolved, I'm just on to my next question...which is to figure out how to configure X to not load a window manager and load a game instead.
Thanks for your help!