Jamdoggy

It seems that the laptop's power settings were causing it to go into sleep mode both when clicking the power button in the start menu, and also when pressing the physical power button on the laptop. This meant that the laptop was never actually shutting down, or even rebooting.

A full shutdown/reboot, however, cured the problem, and the power settings have now been modified in the control panel. This problem is therefore now solved. Not sure if this will help AstaLaVista or not though. Thanks for your help with this. I'll be watching the forums before I get my new Vista PC in January, so that I know more about what I am buying!