Strange Unresponsive/Lock-up Issue

My wife shutdown her Dell Studio 1735 laptop prior to us going away for a few days (as she normally does when we do). Upon return and boot-up, if you acted immediately, you could select the user and enter a password, the system would load, and the desktop would appear. BUT, then after the first mouse click (say selecting a desktop icon or a tray icon, or the start button - does seem to matter what sort of action is taking) the system would basically go dead in that no action with any combination of the mouse or keyboard does anything (e.g, ctrl-alt-delete, alt-tab, clicking on an icon, trying to shutdown, etc.

I had to pull the battery, start up in safe mode (it gets hung up for a bit on safe mode as well), shutdown, and then restart in normal mode. Chkdisk has run a couple of times with no major issues. I've tried this about 10 times and every time, in every mode, the same results - the system seems to go "dead" to any input after the first mouse click or key stroke. My wife also said it happened after the machine was just sitting there idle a few minutes, where she couldn't even log in. So it may some sort of event/process issue.

That being said, I have no clue as to fix. Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hello Efogm and welcome to Vista Forums

Please restart the computer and when the LOGO Screen appears, tap F8 to go to the Advanced Menu Screen
When there, use the Arrow buttons to choose Last Known Good Configuration(Advanced) and follow the prompts.

Or see Advanced Boot Options

Hopefully this will get it to start correctly. Let us know how this worked out