Black Screen on Startup

[at1105]

I'm working on a Dell Inspiron 530 with XP Pro which was acting "funny" according to the owner. First glance at the desktop I noticed several P2P programs commonly associated with viruses along with several pop ups and your basic system resource hogging junk. I removed alot of toolbars and basic 3rd party junkware. Ran MalwareBytes on it to do some basic cleaning which came back with quite a few malware entries. Checked to remove all and then on restart, after the Windows XP logo, I get a black screen. Never boots to the desktop. I ran recovery console thinking somehow the MBR got obliterated. Both fixmbr and fixboot could not repair it just says it's corrupted and cannot be fixed. I logged into safemode and ran Hitman Pro which came back clean. Safe mode works, its a little slow, but it works. Also tried the LKGC and it didnt help either. The jury is still out on normal boot. Just a black screen. No errors or BSOD - just black. Any ideas?

 

[BrentfromZulu]

msconfig and remove all non-essential startup items and services?

 

[at1105]

While in safe mode I checked the device manager and noticed there was a video controller device that wasn't installed. I opened the case and pulled the video card to get the specs on it. Downloaded the drivers, installed them and restarted...now I'm looking at the desktop in normal boot. Weird. I always thought Windows just defaulted to the standard monitor driver so you'd at least get something on the screen but I guess it was trying to start a display mode on boot that wasn't able to start because of the missing or corrupted drivers.