Vista stuck on welcome page

Can anyone help please?

I'm using Vista Home premium on an HP laptop. Yesterday the screen became
stuck and unresponsive, I switched the computer off then on and after the
normal repair / assessment of disk errors etc tried to log-on, the screen got
to welcome with active cursor but got no further.
I entered safe start-up to try to restore system to a point in time, but the
Help system instructions to manually set up the restore point didn't
correlate to any of the available options on the system, I'm not sure if an
Windows automatic update has caused this - does anyone have any thoughts or
suggestions?