fails to start Xvesa, live coreplus17.0 via Ventoy, grub, BIOS desktop

[galen]

downloaded a good copy of coreplus17
placed it on USB2 stick booting via Ventoy.
rebooted, selected Core
boot menu shows,
any selection fails to load Xvesa.

video:
GeForce 8400GS/PCIe/SSE2
cable VGA

did mange to get some info via loglevel=7
and boot up it does create .xsessions

where do I look next?

[Juanito]

Execute the first line of ~/.xsession in a terminal window to see if it gives an error message.