The solution was not pretty but I had to reinstall the SL .5.5 from CD a couple of weeks ago.
While updating all modifications to the SL 5.5 that was made to "grub.conf" I added the fix recommended by a number of you. "nosmp noapic" It now works! kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet nosmp noapic nolapic:wq When you overlay a new version with an old version something did not get updated. I suspect that I did not update "grub". One less problem. Thank You Larry Linder
