This is somewhat of a saga, so please bear with me. I purchased a new Dell desktop running Windows 7 in January for home use. At the suggestion of an IT person at work, I also purchased and installed Ghost 15.0. Everything was great until April 17. On April 16 we lost power at home. I rebooted the computer and entered my password then walked away until the morning of the 17th, when I noticed an IP conflict on the machine (I had a static IP address set and one of my cable boxes grabbed the address). In any case, I fixed that problem and re-booted the machine. This is when the problem started. I entered my password and the screen went black (but for the cursor arrow). I waited for several minutes but it wouldn't load my desktop. I hit "Ctrl-Alt-Del" and was able to get in to the guest account, but oddly Internet Explorer would not open. I tried re-booting several times, to no avail.
I figured the storm did something. So, I restored to a backup point from a week earlier. Same problem when it booted - it would not load my desktop and just hung up with a black screen. I then restored back another week. Same problem. I had to go back to March 21 before I got the machine to actually load my desktop. I then restored my files and seemingly all was well.
Once I got the machine back to normal, I figured I would copy my known good retore points from the USB backup drive destination to a network drive for safekeeping. Now my status screen in Ghost had multiple files, etc. So, two days ago I decided I would uninstall Ghost and then re-intall and "start over" with a fresh status screen (knowing my good recovery points were safe on my network drive). I un-installed Ghost and re-booted and I had the same issue - after I put my password in the screen hung up (all black but for the cursor arrow).
I then restored to the recovery point that I had created before I un-installed Ghost. I then ran the "fix" option in "install/uninstall" then ran LiveUpdate (and noticed that there was a new release that hadn't been loaded before). The machine is seemingly running fine now.
Also, for what it's worth I performed an anti-virus scan and it's clean. I also ran ChkDsk as well as "Disk Fitness Test" and the disk is fine.
Any thoughts on what's up? Is Norton causing this issue? Is the machine hanging up becuase its looking for drives that it can't fine? Would the black screen have resolved itself eventually (it appears that I had one good boot after the power went out, but the machine had all night to load the desktop).