black screen of nothingness

recently re-aquired one of my old skt 478 motherboards because my original vista home premium 32bit installation had been installed using this board and a 200 gig maxtor drive. I was trying to avoid having to reactivate vista, which failed for probably obvious reasons to everyone else but me.

heres the rub !

reinstalled memory, processor, cdrom, hard drive. fired off no problems
for about a week. Then windows went out and either re-activated or something
which failed and told me to contact microsoft.

I did and the gentleman on the other end of the phone gave me the new installation key for the over the phone activation code window
windows said it was now activated.

1 hour went by and I went to shutdown. Windows was indicating it had downloaded updates that needed to be installed before it shut down.

@ the "Logging off" screen it would give me bsod and then restart the computer
the next time i logged into windows my sidebar was missing and did not load up
restarted and the next time i loaded up I have a black screen with my fully functional mouse pointer macaffe anti virus briefly flashes on the screen assuring me that while i stare at this black screen I will be safe from viruses. Perhaps not the one that took out my vista desktop, but certainly all the rest.
I have tried to reload vista from the dvd but i HAVE SP2 and the dvd is not even sp1. So consequently it will tell me to run the installation disk from inside vista
You can see the irony here...

so my next move is to wipe the hard drive and reload the disk knowing full well that I will have to call microsoft again to reactivate because they seem to think my dvd in the retail package which was purchase from sams club "which i still have the reciept has been installed somewhere else .

man this is a long and brutal of a vista installation gone wrong lol

Will your computer boot in safe mode?

yes. But I am unable to do anything, including opening the task manager
I get the same black screen only there are "safe mode" indicators in the 4 corners
I have already tried a different graphics card but I made no difference as I expected.

Sounds to me you need to make a system restore Via using a vista disc, if you have one place in drive, boot from the cd and navigate to the options for a system restore, i do think there is a tutorial........ ah here we go.... http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/76905-system-restore-how.html follow method 2

478 motherboard as in socket 478? If your cpu is that old consider a new system. Your motherboard is probably conflicting with vista. Have you tied flashing the BIOS?