It does actually load openchrome by itself but I'll try specifying it at boot as well.

I think I've worked out the slimski business. Modern kernels don't give you a proper console, just a framebuffer thing, and with viafb blacklisted (as it has to be to make the screen work at all), that framebuffer console is crippled. One of the things it seems to baulk at is any kind of rapid listing, for example using more or less. It just freezes and goes dead except for the enter key. I think that the display of slimski's report just happens to freeze at that point and that made it look as if what was on the screen was causing the problem. I think I can test if that is happening. Just to satisfy myself.

Thanks for trying but really I think this lappy is at the end of its life. I'll stick to AntiX-21 until it reaches EOL and then I'll have to dump it. If AntiX won't work on it any more, certainly no other distro will.