KSOD on Vista

Hello everyone,

After over 24 hours of going through every forum out there and fighting a pointless battle, I figured I might as well post here and see if anything can be done apart from a fresh re-install.

I have a Vista 32-bit on a 5-year old Dell Vostro 1500. On startup, it shows me the infamous Black Screen of Death with a mouse cursor. I shut my computer down yesterday around noon as I was leaving home and everything was fine (no updates were installed at the time), but when I turned it on last night I had the black screen and that has been the case ever since.
Funny thing is, Safe Mode with Networking works perfectly fine, which is also how I'm writing this right now. Other than that, the list of things I have already tried is countless:
*virus scan
*system restore
*changing registry values (removing and changing event logs, changing the "Shell" value to "explorer.exe")
*disabling my video card completely, then re-installing the video card drivers
*sfc /scannow - that records problems with tcpmon.ini but that's pretty much it, only solution to that seems to be replacing the file from a Vista Install DVD, which I don't have
* downloading the Microsoft Fix - problem with that is, it won't run under Safe Mode, even though I've activated the Windows Installer through Regedit. Still won't work.

I think there are several other things I did that were suggested online, but I've been doing this for pretty much the last 12 hours and I haven't kept track of every little thing I've tried. Nothing has worked. When I contacted Microsoft online support, they said they can fix it through remote access to the computer (most likely through a fresh re-install or upgrade to Windows 7), but that pleasure would cost me $100, which I cannot afford at this point.

I realize this probably means I have to find the Install CD/DVD from somewhere and go for a fresh one, but since that is a bit difficult at this point, I was wondering if there could be any other solution that I might have missed. Any help would be appreciated at this point.

Thanks!