This problem occurs while trying to boot to safe mode or normal mode and booting to last known configuration or reloading using System Recovery Console do not change the behavior.
It completes the OS load process (black screen, XP logo with moving status bar), but on the blue screen with the XP logo center-right and two darker blue bands on the top and bottom it comes up with the hour glass for a second and then goes to the mouse pointer. Mouse movements work, but nothing else works. CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing. This looks like the same screen that comes during statup or shutdown and would normall have white status messages, such as loading network settings. However, no such status messages come up.
Just prior to this happening, Heir had me run a Combo-Fix with a custom script. Combo-Fix restarted automatically and this problem occured.
Thank you for your help.
Tom