Vista - Normal Boot has fuzzy monitor; Safe Mode Reboot loop- Vista 64

When I boot my Vista 64 machine, which had been working normally until 2 days ago, the login screen comes up fuzzy--that is, I can tell it is the login screen, but the image is so highly distorted as to be unusable. The image is fine during the boot process (ie, the post graphics and the green progress bar are fine) until the Vista circle pops up.

When I try to boot in safe mode, the screen image is fine, but the problem is that once it gets to the login screen the computer will reboot, even if I quickly enter the admin password.

If I use a bootable Linux disk (Puppy Linux), the entire computer works fine. This indicates to me that I'm not dealing with a hardware issue.

From the Vista boot DVD I've run chkdsk, and it found no errors on any drives. The startup repair utility also doesn't find anything wrong.

My theory is that the graphics driver for vista has either become corrupted or was badly updated through windows update. Does this theory have any merit? If so, how can I get into Vista to reinstall the video drivers? Would renaming the driver files from ATI get me anywhere?

Or, what else should I check?

Here are some more details as to what I've tried:

--Booting the last known good configuration also gives me the fuzzy monitor.
--I've also tried restoring to older restore points, and this does not resolve the issue.
--I cannot do an upgrade installation since my dvd is not sp1, and I haven't made my own slipstream installation for it.

I tried some more things last night, to no avail:
--I ran sfc from the boot dvd, it found no errors
--I fixed the master boot record for kicks--there were no errors.
--Ran bootlogging, and no drivers are failing to load.

"paulnatale" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:e4c30cec4544ec7c7d9e8e8bf87d0286@xxxxxx-gateway.com...It sounds like a corrupted video driver. Until Vista starts the
video is in VGA mode. The high resolution driver starts
just before the round logo appears. I don't think the video
driver is saved in restore points, so there will be nothing
to restore. Also, in Vista, safe mode does use a high res
video driver, which could be causing the reboot.

If you can get that far, uninstall the video driver, reboot,
then reinstall the latest driver from your card manufacturer,
or ATI, but not from Windows update. It's good practice
to never update hardware drivers from Windows update.

This is fascinating. I'm able to use the video on the motherboard to get into the computer. (I still can't boot into safe mode, it enters a reboot loop). I cleared out the ATI drivers, and used driversweeper to make sure it was clean. After reconnecting the AGP card, the computer booted normally, and the monitor worked fine, albeit without some features since I hadn't yet intalled the drivers.

Once I installed the drivers, the old behavior returned--the display become distorted at the login screen. Thinking it might be an issue with the new drivers, I've installed and uninstalled earlier versions back to one I know for sure used to work. It doesn't work.

So, I think windows update is not the root cause of the problem, but I have tightened the restrictions on windows update so that I'm aware of everything being done there.

I'm going to try removing McAfee, but am really grasping at straws now. My guess is that I'll end up doing a clean install of Vista, which I think is absolutely ridiculous--like shooting a missile at a mouse.

Any other thoughts as to what is going on?

I have had success. Here is the solution:

Uninstalling McAfee, and then using McAfee's removal tool (why they don't make the removal tool = the uninstall exe is a bit of a mystery) immediately made the computer perform better, however it didn't fix my display issue.

I ran a scan from Driver Detective, and found that it thought my VIA Chipset, Sata, CPU to AGP bridge drivers were out of date. I installed the up to date drivers . . . scans still showed them out of date. I paid for Driver Detective, and it updated a lot of drivers that looked to me to be up to date already. Then I put my AGP card back in. DriverDetective downloaded different drivers than are even available on the ATI site to a normal person--in fact they were branded as AMD drivers. It now works!

I don't work for DriverDetective, and am a little irritated that I paid them. To their credit, I have no idea how they could tell I had the wrong drivers or in the case of the ATI Radeon driver, how to get it outside of them.