I have run into a very interesting, not to mention frustrating issue when trying to start up windows. It all started when I was transporting my pc in the back seat of my car. It may have gotten bumped around a little. Now when I try to start it up, it goes through the bios ok and will allow me to enter setup. When I continue through to start windows, it will display the windows loading screen, then when it should load windows the screen just goes blank. The monitor displays the "no input source" message and the green light turns orange (on the monitor). My pc will continue to run, and I even will continue to hear activity coming from the hard drive. Right when this issue happens I hear a humming that is a little louder than usual coming from either the hard drive or the video card (I think it is the video card).
One thing that worries me is that even though the fan on the video card is still operative, the video card is very hot to the touch. I fear that there must be some problem with my video card. Does anyone have any ideas why it might be overheating? Any other ideas? Thank you for the help.

the fact you can see the boot sequence and also the windows loading screen seems like it isnt a dead video card,
i had a dead video card before, and the internal speaker would just beep and the bios wouldnt let me continue (motherboard depending i guess..)

Can you get into safe mode? Possible driver issue?

I didn't think it is a driver issue, simply because I didn't make any recent changes in the software, and bumping a computer around doesn't knock a driver out of place. I think I'll try your suggestion anyways, maybe safe mode will allow me to get into windows...If you have any other ideas, suggestions please don't hesitate to let me know. I think I will try reinstalling windows tonight if I don't make any progress before then.

Actually, Graham, I think you might be on to something. I recently installed the sp3 update for windows and I have heard that some AMD computers may not boot up properly following the update. Mine happens to be an AMD. I suppose I should look into how I might uninstall this update.

I guess I put this post in the wrong section. Instead of being under hardware, it should have been under windows os. The problem was with my video driver not wanting to load when I started xp. I blame sp3 for the issues I had. Thank you graham for your input.