Vista won't boot but safe mode will

Yo~!

My problem has been going on for a while but has recently gone over the edge and caused me some big problems. I play Second Life and from time to time, it would freeze up my computer but yesterday, the screen of the laptop just went black and I had to hard reboot my computer, only for it to come up with the Vaio screen looking horrible graphically. Then it would commence to the normal boot up and then to a black screen and it stayed there all night. I've tried removing everything with Second Life off of my computer and it still won't boot up completely. I tried leaving it on overnight to see if would bypass the black screen but it wouldn't. How should I go about fixing this? I can try getting my hands on the Vista DVD and or the recovery disks from my girlfriend. I would honestly just like to know what caused the problem and how to fix it because you can easily learn from your mistakes by fixing it. Oh, another interesting tidbit is that my brother used the computer beforehand to do some research then left it on and when he came back, the screen was black and when he rebooted it, the screen was messed up and he did a system restore to bring it back to normal but if I tried that now, it would still only boot up in safe mode and not regularly.

Try uninstalling and new drivers/software and see how that goes!