I just did a reinstall with gnome using these instructions and I've managed to get it to boot but I end up with a dark blue background with a mouse cursor on it (and no wallpaper). I can move the mouse by clicking th screen, but the rest of the gnome environment never seems to load. I also checked to see if the problem was gnome by installing xfce and got the same thing.

I'll take a look and make sure I have all of the packages set up that you recommended, but I'm curious as to if you might have any ideas of why gnome might not be loading (fully) on its own.

Do I need to tell gdm to load gnome or should that just be default?