Or when their fancy "Display some dots on the screen instead of kernel output on bootup" thing (Plymouth) only gets properly disabled by GDM and will otherwise

Or when their fancy "Display some dots on the screen instead of kernel output on bootup" thing (Plymouth) only gets properly disabled by GDM and will otherwise continue to draw glowing dots across your window manager and applications. At least, that's what I found when I tried to run XDM + xmonad on my ARM netbook. Eventually had to go in and hack the XDM startup script so it too would properly shut off Plymouth before trying to run.