Hi all I tried to search here and didnt find much about this, google gives 1000's of unresolved posts so this is a common problem somehow.

I working on a friends computer when it is turned on it boots up fine, shows the initial WINDOWS loading and then goes blank. No mouse curser or anything can be seen. It is not the monitor and the computer boots and works fine in safe mode. I disabled the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager as suggested on microsoft forums but that didn't help either. I assume it is not a hardware error as safe mode wotks. I could pull the video card but I wasn't SURE windows 7 would function with on board gfx.

Thanks in advance.Hi there! If your computer is working in safe mode but not when booted normally chances are a corrupt service or startup process that does NOT load when implementing safemode is the problem.

To resolve this you may go about it two ways:

A. Implement system restore and select a restore point prior to the problem first turning up

B. Use the MSCONFIG UTILITY to turn off all unnecessary startup processes and services.

There's LOTS out there on system restore so I'll skip to MSCONFIG.

Hit your start BUTTON, select "RUN", type MSCONFIG, select the startup tab and disable EVERYTHING.
Next, go to the services tab, (and this is important!) Select "Hide all microsoft Services" and ONLY THEN uncheck EVERYTHING.
If you don't select "hide all microsoft services" it will break Windows.

Now select apply or OK and attempt to restart the computer normally.

If the unit does NOT start, than my guess was wrong and you should undo the changes.

IF the unit does start then you should quickly download anti-virus and anti-malware (or update your existing products) and scan the machine.
After this is complete you should experiment a bit, start by turning all the services back on and see if the computer still boots, if not systematically determine what service caused the problem.

In general all startup processes that are not your anti-virus may (and should) remain off, but services should be turned back on (except whatever one(s) is/are broken or malicious). 

Hope this helps!