I upgraded from 14.04 to 14.10 on my lenovo x201 laptop that is dual booted with windows and ubuntu using grub.

After I type in my password, the screen hangs and all i see is the background wallpaper.

I can boot in safe mode with failsafe graphics and it loads properly.

EDIT:

I was able to make it work by doing the following:

When the grub menu loads (you need to hold shift after the bios screen), I select my kernel image and press 'e' to edit the boot parameters. At the end of the line beginning with "Linux" I append the option "i915.modeset=0". Turns out I can omit the "xforcevesa" option.