Computer hangs on startup - black screen?

I've had this happen to me twice in the past two days:
I start up my computer, and just as Vista is about to load, the screen is black and it just hangs there. The hard drive light on my computer is solid (no flickering), and it just stays like that. I have to restart using the power button, and Vista then starts up normally...

any ideas as to what could be causing this problem?

 

Any external devices hooked up during start? Try also updating your drivers - let Vista do this.

cheers ...

 

You may want to check error and system logs too.

 

explorer.exe got corrupted and is not linked to the Kernel. Most probably you have a program not letting Vista to shut down properly. I had a similar issue due to SAV Corporate .

It reboots because Vista is smart and fixes itself when it can do it.

 

Happened to me the other day, I think yesterday, was messing around with the "monitor off" switch of Nircmd, and it looped infinetly, and I had to force shut down. Anyways, it hanged for me after the splash screen (the Aurora since I have no gui boot), then in safemode hanged after crccheck.sys loaded. Fixed it by running repair startup. You can either do it two ways, download the recovery disk for Vista (it'll be like the first link you find usng Google, it's a torrent. Also around 120MB or 148MB depending on what arch you're running), or run the recovery right off your Vista install disk if you have it. Just pop in the disk, then hit Repair, think it's going to be a link on the lower left corner of one of the screens. It's definately before you enter your license key/install Vista again.
If that doesn't work, all I can think of is either run chkdisk or sfc /scannow through the command prompt in recovery, or just reinstall Vista since it'll just move all your User folder and reinstall Windows (no need to do a format unless a virus caused this). Good luck.

 

thanks for the replies guys

after rebooting everything worked normally... i've probably had over 10 successful boots since then
i didnt think much of it the first time, but i got worried the 2nd time it happened

still trying to find the cause, looking through error logs...
at the moment it seems to have happened at random

 

Don't open the champagne yet. I had this issue for months and it went away for a few weeks but came back in the most annoying moments. My issue, as I said, was SAV corporate and the stupid Asus webcam driver. On the shutdown/restart procedure, they would not let go of the registry. Try seeing which is which. Event log, unfortunately, is not very helpful.