Greetings Experts!

I have someone with an Inspiron 1545 running Vista Basic. The original problem was that it seemed to have a problem displaying the desktop. It appears to boot, but when in Windows, it shows a blank screen with only the mouse pointer visible. The screen saver is visible after it kicks in, but no desktop or menus. No key commands appear to do anything.

I tried running the Diags. It went through the preliminary pre-check steps and found no errors or issues, but when it gets to the point where you're supposed to see the regular options, I just get a message on the top of the screen that overlays the previous screen: "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to restore.". So I can't manually run any of the other standard tests.

And that's as far as I'm getting. Any ideas? I was going to do a full system recovery from the backup CDs, but I don't want to waste my time if there's a hardware problem.

Thank you in advance for any input.