I was deleting applications to make room for additional software (my child plays games on this older computer), and things were going fine until the computer when to sleep while we ate dinner. When I tried to reboot a nuimber of times, the disks and CDs all responded as normal (you can hear the access going on), but the screen only responded as a dark, dark blue (almost) black - no images came up. You can hear the disk going through the motions of booting, and if I put the boot disk in, the same is true. But I cannot do anything because I cannot see the screen. Any ideas?

try another monitor, then a diff video card

When you say you were deleting applications do you mean "uninstalling" them? If you pick off files you can land in trouble because sometimes they are shared or system files. You will also retain the registry entries. DerekW