Frozen Desktop. Help!!

[butterflyhope]

My other lappy has decided to play up. Its an Acer and its Windows XP.
I had been downloading anti virus and spyware programs and during it my lappy over heated and shut down. When i went to reboot it i found my desktop was frozen. Ive rebooted over and over again with no joy. I get to the desktop and i cant right or left click, cant open anything. the only thing i can do it move my cursor and press CTRL+ALT+DEL to open up the task manager but thats it.

Ive tried to start it up in safe mode but when i do this i get get a black screen with all sorts of files written on it and then it does no more.

I have no idea what to do now.
Does anyone have any ideas?

[caperjack]

something you install may have caused a drive conflict ,
if you have a winxp cd you could boot to it and do a repair ,and at the dos prompt type in "chkdsk /r " with out the " and there is a space between the k and the /
Or remember the Chrysler K-Car ,known lemon of cars,well you bought the laptop version of the K-Car ,just my opinion of Acer laptops .