screwed? no longer able to boot

ok, you guys were champs two years ago and really helped me out - so i'm hoping we'll have the same luck this time. fyi - my knowledge is only intermediate. the system is vista home premium.

First, I have not followed the READ ME FIRST instructions this time because I can not boot up in any mode - safe, normal, safe w/command prompt, etc. Immediately after the sign-in page, the screen goes entirely black.

The problem seemed to start with Avira notifications of infected files coming in - so i clicked on "deny access". There were several of them. The computer then ran a little wonky - so i ran an Avira system scan (found one suspicious and a few warnings, fixed all). Then to double check, I ran spybot and it found several malware and security problems - spybot reported to have fixed them all. Both avira and spybot were already on the system and had been used before.

then i rebooted and afterwards i could not connect to the internet (connection was fine). so I ran avira and spybot again, and again they found problems and reported fixing them. after rebooting a second time, I was unable to get past the sign-in page on any type of reboot. It seems to respond to nothing - if I ctrl-alt-del, it will bring up the task manager, but then an error post saying it has stopped working.


i regret not having written down any of the problems reported by avira and spybot - although i did check the list at the time and nothing seemed too dastardly - no reported trojans or worms.... so i did not anticipate any major problems.

any ideas? there are a few posts with somewhat similar stuff, but didn't seem to quite fit. Your help would be so appreciated. Happy to do all the pre-work on the list if I can only get to it...Is there something that I can usb to it?

thanks in advance.

 

chaslang - please see the first paragraph of my original post and see that I did note that the system was windows vista premium.

i discovered that i was able to utilize task manager through the safe mode and so i've done a complete system recovery and since i had a very recent backup, no real problems.

all seems ok - we'll see if the problem is fixed longterm.

thanks for your reply.