For some strange reason that I can’t seem to figure out, I get kernel panics on the battered Thinkpad with the latest Arch installation ISO. I won’t bother reproducing the error text here, mostly because there’s too much of it, but also because the screen is shattered and I can’t quite see everything. 
The puzzle is compounded by the fact that it doesn’t seem to happen on the smaller Thinkpad. Both machines are Celerons, with reasonably similar guts, but for whatever reason the kernel panic doesn’t happen on the slower one.
The good news is, if you’re like me or like some others, the previous ISO image — the 2007.08 version — boots fine, and it’s a brief step up from those packages to current. So you have that option, if you find yourself in the same boat.
Could it be a hardware failure? I’ve had to toss the motherboard from a machine older than that because it randomly started throwing kernel panics for no reason in particular. (I mean, when the machine sits there for months running Debian stable with no trouble then randomly starts locking up and throwing error messages, there’s not too much else that could be wrong.
)
I’m leaning away from a hardware failure, since it’s working fine under a full installation upgraded from 2007.08. I don’t follow the changes to the ISO as well as I could, but something between the two is different, and the newer one doesn’t quite work for me. No matter; it’s an easy matter to upgrade. No big problem.