So after the power went off earlier, I went to restart my computer. It boots up and loads Windows just fine, but when it cuts to the black screen where it goes to the Desktop, nothing happens. Any ideas? Surge protector does work and was still fine, opened up my desktop and nothing was fried. Could this have been something that just happened to appear when my comp restarted and power failure a coincidence? I have some projects I need to finish.

can you boot up with something like say... knoppix?

Or see if Safe Mode gets any further.