Black Screen w/ Mouse pointer after boot

Hey all,
Been a long time, but I'm back with the weird questions again.
Ok, Last week i got a notification that there was an update from MS.
Glanced at it, was MS's anti malware or whatever..clicked ok, (this will teach me to pay more attention) it did its thing...
Ok, turn comp. off for the night, next day turned it back on, and POST, and Splash screen..and ....nothing. Black screen with a mouse pointer and thats it.
Its not the video card since i saw the post and splash.
so i restart, safe mode will work right?! nope, Black screen again, only it says safe mode in all four corners and WinxP service pack 2 at the top...

Any clues?

Running Win xp Pro
SP2 all updates
2 gb ram.
300gb hd.
help me please, i need my baby back!

 

Have you tried using F8 and booting into "Last known good configuration"? You might look at this link too: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324764/en-us It has to do with the XP video/AGP services that 'talk' to the video drivers. You can also try to reload WinXP 'over the top' of itself (a safe reload)....

hd2k

 

Just wanted to thank everyone for their input on this,
(just in case anyone is searching for a solution to a similar problem)
I pulled the HDD, and moved to the slave position on another unit that had
Acronis's Disk Director software on it. (a program i really recommend) went in with the program and deleted the Windows update file from my Win Xp pro that was giving me trouble. Then I did a reinstall over the old O.S. and like hopperdave suggested. That seems to have worked well for me. *a note ..I have my drive partitioned into three logical drives. OS, Programs, and Data, so i did not lose anything important when i overwrote the OS partition. Had to run "repair" on a few of the programs i had installed but no big deal. Hope this helps someone else. The tattooed computer nerd!

 

Glad to see that you got it all worked out

hd2k

 

Recently I came across something that talked about verifying your updates before restarting your computer - I'm sure that would have helped you tatcompnerd, but does anyone know anything more about this? Like the all-important question - how do you DO this??