Windows 7 boot problem

My Samsung laptop (model E452, about 2 years old) suddenly stopped working when I went to turn it on today.

It worked perfectly last night, and I went to turn it on today and was greeted with a black screen. I pressed F2 and restored the BIOS settings to default, and now I can get Windows (7) to boot. It gets to my desktop, attempts to load for a few seconds (cursor has the egg timer on it) and then the timer disappears and the computer becomes unresponsive.

Now I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this next part. When I boot in Safe Mode, none of the UI works. It's quite hard to explain, but essentially buttons and folders that normally say "Ok" or "Cancel" etc are blank; they have no text. It looks like this:
http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/6174/121217183658.jpg
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/6245/121217183723.jpg.

I've tried the Samsung Basic Recovery solutions and the only one I haven't exhausted is a C Drive wipe.

The ONLY thing I can think of that was out of the ordinary was some video problem. I went to play a game last night and a popup said something to the effect of needing DirectX2.0 or higher. I closed it and the game ran fine, as did the laptop until now.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated



Even if this Safe Mode problem could be fixed I'm sure I could go from there.