My first guess would be a video driver conflict.

Cases where I have seen this is where the monitor has changed and the drivers aren't supported.
SP 2 is installed and you're getting driver conflicts.

Instead of booting to safe mode, use the bootlog option. Boot until point of failure. Reboot to safe mode and you should be able to review the bootlog.txt file in Notepad to see what is causing the failure.

ok, so i set up to capture the bootlog. but after booting regularly to black screen, then rebooting to safe mode, the log only showed my safe mode boot.

i did the exact same thing again, and once again, the log only showed the safe mode boot.

i did try going through my device manager and updating all of my drivers for everything. a few of them got updated, but most didn't have any new drivers. my video card was updated. the problem persists though.

So do you get an error message? because it sounds to me that there is no real error at all. Maybe your hard drive is fragmented and the blankness is from windows having to find the winlogon.exe file.

Unless I misunderstand, but you are saying when you boot windows - you get the 'loading' screen or whatever, it says Windows XP (Home / Pro) with the little loading boxes going, and then before you get to the logon prompt there's a brief blank screen? or after you get the loading screen, the ONLY thing you get is a blank screen?

It is the latter. After the "load" screen, I only get a blank screen. Possibly missing the winlogon.exe huh? I'll search the hard drive to see if I've got it in the system files.

If I can't find it, I'm sure I can find a copy somewhere (unless someone WANTS to give me a link), or should I just reinstall windows? I really don't want to loose all my data, and it would be a HUGE hassle to copy everything.

Boot to the recovery console off the windows cd.

If you don't know how:

1. Insert the disk, "Press any key to boot", after everything loads, you have the option of the recovery console, install windows, and something else I've never read.

2. Tap R for the recovery console, it'll look for all installations of Windows, it should prompt you for which install you want to access. Usually, it'll have something to the effect of:

   C:\WINDOWS>
   you type: 1 <enter>
   

3. It may ask for an administrator password. If you have one, type it. If not, just hit enter.

4. Once you get to the prompt, run scandisk:

   chkdsk /r
   

   The /r tells it to repair whatever error's it finds.

Hopefully, this works for ya 🙂

You said you added memory to your PC. What type of memory did you add. If you added DDR (RAMBUS RAM) know that they work in pairs, also how many memory slots do you have? If you have four slots of memory and filled only two of them make sure the other two are not left empty.

One last thing, should I be worried about installing sp0 over sp2? I'm not certain, but I think the xp pro I have is sp0. It might be sp1, but I KNOW it's not sp2 and I have upgraded to sp2 in the meantime.

I had a persistent problem with that once before. I would boot up and poof just a black screen.

I found out it was a bad SATA drive, the controller went bad on it, so I removed it and the computer ran normally.

I sent the drive back to WD and they sent me a refurbished one, which I promptly threw into an old PC because I won't put refurbished parts in my good computers.

Shame on WD. So now I use Seagate, will never use WD again because they sent me a refurbished drive and refused to send me a new one. I had one Seagate go bad on me, and I asked them for a new drive that was not a refurb and the lady on the phone said "Sure, no problem!." Now that's service! 😈