Hi
Weez, and welcome to Geeks to Go!
Unfortunately, corrupted System Restore files are much more common than they should be. I'll give you some instructions later to get you a good System Restore point. But first, let's get you into Normal Mode.
Boot into Safe Mode, I'm sure you know how by now.
Click on the Start Pearl, and in the search box type in
msconfig and press
Enter. This will open the Microsoft System Configuration Utility.
Click on the
Services tab, select the check box
Hide all Microsoft services down at the bottom, and then click the
Disable all button. This will disable all non-microsoft services from starting up when you boot up your computer. It is important that you select "Hide all Microsoft Services"
before pressing the "Disable all" button.
Click on the
Startup tab, and press the
Disable all button. In this screen there are no Microsoft programs hanging out, so just click the button. This will stop all programs from starting up when your computer boots up (the ones that you usually see in your system tray like Dropbox, Logitech, Adobe, Intel.)
Click
Apply, then
OK. The utility will close and a new dialog box will open, select
Restart to immediately restart your computer into Normal mode.
If your computer will successfully boot into normal mode with the startup services and programs disabled, we can narrow down the culprit by opening msconfig in Normal mode (since you can get in), selecting the checkbox next to a couple of services, rebooting, and seeing if the problem occurs again.
Please post back with your results. Good luck!