Perhaps more than an old video driver...

The original bit:
"Truth is, I don't even know where to start.
I've got an HP dv9000 series, running Vista Ultimate on a Centrino duo with an nvidia GeForce Go 7600.
I was trying out dreamscenes a month ago, but each time I closed, locked, hibernated, anything of that nature to my computer, it would then (after reopening, whatever) give me a "Display Driver _____ has stopped responding but has recovered successfully" message. Well, a couple days of that had me switching back to a normal background (couldn't find any cool, free dreamscene vids anyway), yet the problem continued to occur, however less frequently.

In the last couple of days, each time I locked or hibernated then shut my laptop, reopening it led to a blank black screen, though still "lit" and the computer still on. A power off and reboot was necessary to fix this, bringing up the "Computer failed to shut down properly, what do you want to do?" bit.
Last night, this occurred, but nothing I've done has gotten anything more than this dimly glowing black screen.
(Granted, I'm not super tech-savvy, but I learn things quick and know a little bit.)"


Well, I borrowed my dad's extra monitor, plugged my computer in, and turned it on. Everything booted up, but now with a "Windows Failed to Start" bit. Option 1: Insert Windows disks and choose repair, or 2 ick between various safe modes, start from last known good config, and normal boot up.
I went with last known good config (made sense to me), and everything started working a-okay (even with video on my laptop's screen). I looked into updating my video driver, turns out HP gets custom GeForce cards for their laptops and thus makes their own updates. According to them, I was all up-to-date, but I decided to download the video driver update anyway, just in case. Partway through the download, my computer froze up, and has only gotten worse.
I can only boot it up in safe mode; other attempts just stop in a post-vista-loading-bar state. There's also this almost barcode like glitchiness going on in the background (and no video on the laptop, only on the monitor). I deleted a couple files and some waste-of-space old programs, but no resolution. I then did a system restore to Jan 10th, pre-windows-update. Still no cigar.

And that's where I reside as of now.
Any ideas out there? Please?

 

Time to clean install. If it still has problems, it's from the hardware, and the laptop needs to be serviced.