I have a HP Pavillion dv9000 w/ Windows Vista on it. I bought it just over a year ago and havent had any problems until this weekend. I shut it down to travel to Vegas and when I got to Vegas to try and logon, after entering my password, my screen just hung-up at the "welcome" screen. At first, I left it sit for awhile (hours) then tried restarting. I tried safe mode and I went into BIOS to run diagnostics. Nothing works. My computer will not login whatsoever. Can anyone help or has anyone else experienced this and if so, what did you do? I also called HP techsupport (when I returned to San Diego) who tried to help me but they knew less than I did. They told me to reload the OS with my recovery disks, but I am hoping someone has a solution that doesnt lead me to losing everything on my hard drive. Thus, I need help. Thanks.

You could acquire a Vista DVD and do a repair install, or you could boot with a live CD of Ubuntu, put all your data onto an external hard drive, run the recovery discs to restore Vista, and then put your data back onto the computer.

Thanks for the info. After much painstaking troubleshooting and deliberation, I ended up doing a system recovery afterall. Apparantly, it is a software related issue within Vista or MS that caused the problem since I am back up and running now after a half day of getting my computer back to where I was a week ago. Thanks for the comments.