HP and Vista is a neverending adventure in reboot and reformat

Of course the destructive recovery done last week didn't last for long and didn't fix the problem.

After backing up all my data and doing a destructive restore things started off rather auspiciously.

Programs installed without issue. I restarted after each program was installed to see if a certain program was at fault. No problems. Everything went on great, it looked like I had all my data back and programs rinning fine.

The HP update ran. I foolishly accepted installing the updates it recommended for the computer.

You can guess what happened next.

Yep, after the restart, straight to the black screen of death.

Every program installed since, every Microsoft update installed since causes the same thing.

So I called HP support again.

Of course, they have no record of the online chat assistance or the service call I made last week.

After discussion with the tech, they've decided since I already did a destructive software recovery from the partition they will ship me the recovery by disc.

So I get to do a whole new reformat.

Anybody want to place a bet on whether this fixes the problem?

Given that I had XP running on a system for about 7 years without having to reformat without this kind of trouble I certainly can't recommend Vista 64 for anyone at this point as in less than 2 months its been causing all sorts of issues. On the upside, I'm getting really good at backing up and restoring my data grrr.