Thanks,
After at least twelve hours on the phone and exhausting 3 different helpful
Dell techs, I was told that I would need to reinstall windows. For my last
attempt, i checked out fixyourwindows.com and followed the instructions to
run regedit and deleted "vgabak" from the registry everywhere i saw it. When
I noticed there was one key that everytime I deleted it, it immediately
reappeared, I checked out the listed location in c:windows\web... No sign of
a "vgabak" file, but there was a suspicious looking .tmp file that kept
changing size. Without really knowing what I was doing I rebooted in safe
mode, was able to delete the .tmp file and the vgabak.exe file, and now
everything seems to be ok. Thanks again for your help everyone.