When I turn on my computer it boots up to a blank black screen with only the mouse pointer arrow showing. A little history..... Yesterday I purchased a DVD writer and installed it and it worked just fine. Today I ran spybot SD update and then ran the immunize feature which also seemed to work fine. At the same time I was updating itunes to Version 9.0 when I got a small windows error. I don't know exactly what it said because I didn't have time to read it but it had something about win32 and that it was malicious software and would shut down windows. I've tried to boot up with my last known configuration that worked. I've tried safe mode, safe mode with networking. None of these do anything different. All I get is the blank black screen with the white windows mouse cursor (which I can move about the screen). Which does me no good ;) What I have is a black screen with a mouse arrow cursor that I can move about the page. When I open in Safe mode I have the safe mode words in all 4 corners of the screen and the windows svc pack information at the top. So what I'm missing is my desktop screen/information/icons/etc. The computer boots up normally until the point after the windows xp logo appears and then I don't get my screen where I choose guest, administrator log in.

Can you get into safe-mode? Have you tried to get bacck to a restore point prior to problems arriving (via safe-mode or recovery console; the former being easier than the latter...?)

I get into safe mode with safe mode in white letters in all 4 corners and a mouse cursor but the screen is black also. I cannot get to a restore point because the os doesn't show up. Don't have the recovery console.