Vista is Crashing after startup, need help.

Hey guys,

About a month ago I installed windows vista. Everything ran smoothly up until this morning. I had powered the computer down for an extended period of time because i was having trouble sleeping. I do this occasionally and have done it maybe one or two other times over the past month. Regardless, it shouldn't be an issue to shut one's computer off at night.

When I turned the computer on in the morning and logged in I got a very quick blue screen and then a restart following. I thought to myself, great it's overheating. So without checking the temps I got out the vacuum and dusted out the innards to my PC, I also reset the cpu heat-sink, cleaned out the X850 heat sink and made sure nothing was loose.

I restarted the computer and experienced the same issue. At this point I was rather frustrated as I couldn't understand what the problem was. I disconnected and reconnected all power cables and tried one last time. This time the bsod gave some brief information about the graphics driver causing the crash so I promptly booted up in safe mode.

(Let it be known that the computer runs completely fine in safe mode...I am in fact typing this in safe mode right now. I've also run prime95 with no errors. So I'm going to assume that this is a software issue.)

I uninstalled the X850 drivers and rebooted the computer. Even without graphics drivers I had the same crash. I tried pulling out my wireless card with no success. Ran a virus-scan and ad-aware scan with no results. Ran Memtest without results. Ran a disk check...and am out of fresh ideas.

Can anyone help?

System:
AMD opteron 2800 mhz
DFI lanparty ultra D NF4
X850 XT
X-Fi
2gigs of PGI ram
80gig hard

Whilst I haven't had the same issue, I have had similar ones on many occasions with XP.

I'm not too familiar with Vista's safe mode, but the only thing I can suggest in such a situation is you disable all non-essential services using something like msconfig then re-enable them a few at a time, waiting to find out if one of them is causing this.

I had a simular thing happen a few days ago after installing a program. Boot to safe mode, and then I used a restore point. All was happy in Vista ville. What had happened was I installed something, but didnt reboot for a few days, but once I finally rebooted, BSOD.