I, and a couple of other people it seems, have a problem booting ReactOS on real hardware.
After the disk checking stage, it freezes. If I modify the registry so it boots into a console, it works, but as soon as I run any graphical application, it freezes.
A few people on the reactos.com forum have mentioned something similar happen to them, so it doesn't just seem to be my crappy machine I use to test it. It only seems to happen when changing into graphics mode, too.
Just thought I'd mention it - someone might be able to fix it as I wouldn't know where to look!