Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade caused blank screen upon rebooting

I'd have to say the upgrade process 10.04 (from either 8.04 or 9.10) has been excellent for me.  It had worked flawlessly for me from a powerful quad core 12 GB desktop to a meager netbook powered by Cyrix C7-M before I encountered this problem.  This happened on a Dell Latitude X300, a reliable machine served as light-duty server for me for years.  The upgrade went fine until after restarting, where I was greeted by a blank screen shortly after seeing the splash screen.  It turned out to be an issue with the graphics controller inside the old 855PM chipset (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes).  The Workaround A suggested in the wiki (re-enabling KMS, Kernel Mode Setting) worked for me.  I just dropped into root shell and ran

echo options i915 modeset=1 | tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf update-initramfs -u

The next rebooting went through without a hitch.