RH 7.3 keyboard and mouse freeze at x startup

[niranjan <niranjan rajani welho com>]

Hello,
After installing succefully RH 7.3, keyboard and mouse don't respond at 
all as soon as I get the graphical login box.

- mouse and kb are PS/2
- they work at grub, they work during the boot process (I can type 
anything during the boot)
- they stop as soon as the graphical box appears.

- Computer is a Siemens, 233MHz Pentium, 256 RAM, with a simple graphics 
card which did get detected properly at intallation and the picture 
seems to be quite OK at 1024x768 resolution.
- It dual boots windows, which is working fine, with grub loading it 
nicely.

my questions are:
- how do I *interrupt the boot process* to get a text based console to 
try to change runlevel and/or take any other measures?
- what do do after i manage to interrupt the boot, and do manage to get 
a text base console?

I can boot from teh floppy, but that also throws me to the graphical box

I have searched the list archives but found no solution. Only one 
similar problem someone has with RH 7.2, and no solutions.

niranjan