Vista Black Screen Blinking Cursor After logon

[Sandy]

I am the supervisor of a Help Center on a college campus, and work on
students' computers as the students have issues. I don't always know what
happened immediately before the issue appears. This one has me stumped. Here
is the data:
Dell Inspiron 1525 (Celeron)
Vista Home Basic
2GB Ram
Bios Date 6/2008

Problem: Computer boots to logon, accepts password, appears to be loading
Vista, then comes to a black screen with an arrow.

Other: Does the same thing in Safe Mode. Control & Alt & Del do not work

Tried and failed solutions:
Diagnostics - ok
Repair from CD
Chkdsk /r command
Restore to earlier date
Booted to Last Good Configuration
BootRec /rebuildbdc command
Reset Bios
Reseated Memory and switched it around
Booted without Power Cord
Disabled USB in Bios
Disabled 1394 in Bios
Read through Dell Forum

One thing I couldn't get to work was to change the winlogon shell registry
item to explorer, through a command prompt. The path is
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WIndowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon. I tried to change
the value data frm cmd.exe /k start cmd.exe to Exploer.exe, BUT every time I
restarted the machine it reverted back.

Any ideas? I have the data backed up, ready to do a system restore. Sadly, I
have seen this several times, and would love to find a fix for it.

Thanks to anyone who can help!
Sandy

 

[Richard Urban]

Try tapping F8 just as Vista begins to boot up. This will take you to the
advanced boot option menu.

You can try booting with the last known good configuration. This may get you
in. You can also try again using low resolution booting - in case someone
has set the Window resolution above the capabilities of the video system.

Let us know how it works out.

 

[Sandy]

Actually, I have tried to use the lower resolution to boot, as well as the
advanced boot options, also, tried selecting the option to ignore the driver
compatibility check with Vista (I don't remember the exact wording.)
Sandy

 

[Andrew Murray]

The list of things he's already tried included that.


Tried and failed solutions: