Update! It looks like the original solution I posted did not resolve my problem. The problem is back again. After spending a few hours searching the web, I found that it may actually be a hardware defect and that the NVIDIA GPU may have a problem. Un-install the drivers and use the standard Windows VGA drivers as a temporarily solution to make the machine usable. Your computer may be covered under under HP’s extended warranty. The laptop I had was not covered. What finally solved my problem was a complete wipe out of the system and re-install of Vista. Please check out these links if the solution below does not work for you:
GEFORCE GO 7600 Driver - NVIDIA Forums
I recently received an HP Pavillion dv9000 with a NVidia GeForce Go 7 7600 video card with Windows Vista boot to a black screen with just a cursor. This is now affectionalty known as the Black Screen of Death in the industry. Ctrl-Alt-Del didn’t do anything. System restore was not enabled either. I could get the machine to boot into Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, I un-installed the NVidia GeForce drivers, rebooted, and booted fine in Normal Mode. However, it attempted to automatically re-install the video drivers, so on the next reboot, same problem. The second time around, I booted into Safe Mode, removed the video drivers, booted into normal mode, and let it install the drivers again (I can’t figure out a way from stopping Vista from doing this). Once it installed the drivers, I un-installed them, but this time in Normal Mode, I had an option to remove the drivers from the computer. After that, it booted fine. I went to NVidia’s site and downloaded the lated GeForce Go 7 7600 drivers. Here are a couple other solutions you can try if it’s the video driver.
1. System Restore (in my case, System Restore was not enabled, so this was not an option).
2. Run a repair installation of Vista.
3. When you get to the black screen with the cursor, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, run Task Manager, then end the explorer.exe process. Then, go to File -> New Task and type: explorer.exe. If that works, then a repair install should take care of your problem.
I tried several variations of the NVIDIA drivers and they all caused my system to blue screen with nvlddmkm.sys. Again, I believe wiping out my system and doing a fresh install of Vista has resolved the issues. One thing that you should be aware of is the Windows Update has a driver update for the GeForce 7600, and I have a suspicion that is what may have originally caused all the issues. Going into the Windows Update settings in Vista and hide this update, and only allows security updates. Do not allow Windows Update to do hardware driver updates, I have seen it cause problems before.
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