Shoutbox

Hmm, something similar hapened to me once.

When you get the black screen and mouse pointer, can you use ctrl+alt+del to bring up the task manager?

If so, is Explorer running? If it isn't, start it using file>new task and see if that helps. If it already is running, kill the task and restart it.

This worked time for me but I haven't a clue what the problem was, so it could be worth a try...