I heard a weird one from a friend of mine. Seems their pc goes to black screen with safe mode in all 4 corners. Like with no cursor and ctrl alt delete does nothing. Not sure what windows version. Anybody ever heard of that? Thanks

you mean the whole screen goes black? what stage of safe mode? or does it go to cmd prompt?

Let's see here, the hp logo comes up then it goes to a black screen with safe mode in each corner. the cursor works but no command prompt or any way to type one in. I tried all the stuff this AM like f-1 then f-5 then f-10 and tried to get back the original default settings but after saving and exiting that screen the pc just shut down. Also got to a point where it gave me the option to restore last valid registry, which I chose, still shut down on it's own. The problem began after downloading a suggested (suggested by hp or micro)update (patch?) <<< this just came up while using the pc, after that all the problems started. The computer belongs to a friend, poor guy..thanks for the reply