out of standby?

Hi:

I need help with a problem I'm having with my Dell E510. I hope someone can help me. I don't know as much about computers as I wish I did

I believe that I'm in standby mode and I can't seem to get out of it.

I had this problem about a week ago and did a google search and found a forum (not this one) which provided me with a solution but I forgot where that web page was and exactly what the solution was, but it was something like "press the power button and hold down the delete key on the keyboard". After I did this the Dell booted up as normal. After telling my wife what the problem was and how I solved it she said she had a similar problem with her PC (another brand) and solved it by pressing the spacebar for a minute or two. Unfortunately thats not working for me.

So, here are the symptoms:

The power button on the front of the tower is blinking continuously with a yellow light.. None of the lights on my keyboard are lit. On the back of the tower the light at the port where I plug in the cable to my DSL modem is lit. when the cable is plugged in.  These lights continue to stay on even if I unplug the power cord. The power outlet that the E510 is plugged into is reliable - I checked it with a table lamp. Moving the mouse does nothing. Pressing the power button doesn't change anything either. I can't open the drawers on the DVD drives. There is nothing displaying on the monitor. I disconnected all USB devices except for the mouse and keyboard and still no change. No fan or any other sounds can be heard from inside the tower.

I am running XP Pro SP3. I have not installed any new hardware or software in the last few months. When this happened last week I thought I might have accidentally put the PC into standby instead of turning it off by mistake, so ever since then I've tried to be careful not to click on the wrong button when shutting down. I have started and shut down the computer successfully several times since I last had this problem. There were no error messages of any kind, and the computer seemed to be operating normally. Aside from the incident last week and this current one I have never experienced this particular problem before.

Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your kind attention.

flick2