Vista hangs during startup on XPS 420

Hello all,

Sorry to post this if it's in the wrong place but I need help.

For the past few days when I boot up my system, it starts up just fine till the point where I sign in to my account on Vista.

The desktop appears, but then before the icons and taskbar have a chance to load, the system freezes.  No mouse, no keyboard.

The hard drive makes small 'working' noises, but it proceeds no further.  I have to shut down by holding down the power button and then restart.  When I  do get restarted, the Intel Matrix storage manager had to rebuild my RAID mirror array which takes about 4 hours. Once this is done, the system is absoluely fine and acts like it always does. I can even RESTART with no problems. It's just twice in a row when I've SHUT DOWN for the night and tried to restart in the morning that this happens.

I spoke to Dell yesterday and the techie guy seemed to think that it had to do with one of the 8 or so updates my Windows Automatic Update downloaded  and suggested a System Restore.  As the RAID array was rebuilding at the time, he held off.  I tried that today and the System restore FAILED! Something to do with theRAID array rebuild?

Anyway, I sure could use some input.  The only other issue I've had is I had some minor graphics card issues about 2 weeks ago that I posted about on the old forum (see below) that seemed to resolve spontaneously.

Can someone help?

Dell 420XPS running Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit
4GB dual channel DDR2 667MHZ [4x 1024]
500G Data Safe local hard drive
DVD+/-RW 16x max and DVD 16x reader
20" wide flat panel monitor
Single 768MB nVidia GeForce 8800GTX
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer PCI soundcard
TV Tuner and AVIO Accelerator
Internal V.92 PCI Data Fax modem
Speedtouch 330 external USB broadband modem
Norton Internet Security
Adobe Reader 7.0.8
MS Office 2007 Home and Student
Standard mouse keyboard and speakers
etc

 

PS Here is my post from the old forum if that helps..

Thanks in advance..

Liz

 

"Hello all,

Starting this morning, my display will briefly go blank then come back on with a message in my taskbar that says that one of my video drivers has caused Windows to stop working.  It names a driver, but goes away too fast for me to get it down. The driver starts with nkd... something. This is a new issue but it has happened five times today already.  I used my Problem Reports and Solutions and it tells me that I need to update one of my video drivers (duh) but which one?  I will tell you I've never had good luck updating drivers, and I know there are been issues with the NVIDIA cards (my computer setup should list below). Dell has several NVIDIA updates listed on the product support site. "

 

After I posted this, the problem stopped and  I just had some lines in my display.  I downloaded a driver update for my monitor as Dell Support suggested and though it didn't help initially, the problem seemed to resolve on it's own..

Thanks