My XP system starts up, displays the first logo screen, mostly black with "Windows XP Home", a four-coloured flag, a bar with 3 moving green dots supposedly indicating activity. The the screen goes blank and stays that way till I press the reset button (keyboard is dead). I can boot in safe mode OK. There is nothing written to the boot log file or the System Event log for the failed attempts to boot in normal mode. This started happening as I was tyring to get some USB devices working. If I use the System Restore function of XP and go back one day, the machine reboots into normal mode but when I restart and try to boot in normal mode, the system hangs in the same way. No apparent viruses or Disk problems. What's going on and how can I fix it? Thanks in advance.

try using the repair function on the XP cd

Check the following for possible help: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q310575 http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prmc_str_yfol.asp

if it only starts in safemode and you installed new hardware it mostlikly is a driver conflict. uninstall drivers in safemode and download latest drivers on oem website. Good luck.

your video driver is working, but it cannot work in the agp mode. Try going into the safe mode, control panel,display, then change IRQ setting to a different one, and change the memory that it is in. Try this a few times till toy get the right setting to get display in normal mode

Original poster here. Problem turned out to be that I had plugged in a PS/2 mouse and still had a serial mouse plugged in. I could have one or the other plugged in, boot normally and have the mouse recognised automatically and be able to use it. But plug both in and XP can't boot (except in safe mode), just stalls at a blank screen. This (having a PS/2 & a serial mouse plugged in) normally works with other Windows I've used (9x, NT). I can even use both mice. One might at least expect a warning message or something from XP. It seems it doesn't take much to throw it for a loop, so to speak... Has anyone else had this problem with two mice or similar scenarios? Anyone have an explanation of this behaviour? Thanks again big time to all who responded.