I get the welcome screen.
I click on my user and get the "logging on" screen.
After that all I get is a black screen with a mouse cursor. I can't even start task manager. No ctrl+alt+del or ctrl+shift+escape.

It stays like this for about 10 minutes, then the desktop finally starts loading. According to the hdd led on my case, windows isn't even trying to access the hard drive for that whole time. It's just hanging doing nothing it seems.

What I have tried:

• Uninstalled video driver and removed leftovers with driver sweeper
• Disabled all startup programs and non microsoft services
• Loaded "last known good configuration"
• Ran the alleged "black screen fix" from prevx against my best judgement (don't really like running random exes without knowing what they do at all)

None of that works.

I can boot into safe mode normally.

My specs:

• i7 920
• Gigabyte X58-UD3R
• Gigabyte HD5870 1GB
• 12GB Mushkin Silverline 1333MHz
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64

I'm also having another problem which I suspect is related.
After I have gotten the computer up and running, everything works perfectly, but when it's been on for a while it starts behaving strangely when changing display modes.
When I start up a game or anything that changes the screen resolution the computer freezes for about a minute every time until I reboot again.

I think this is probably related to the black screen problem.

Just thought I'd check to see if anyone has had the same problem.
Let me know if I should post any more details about my system to help diagnose this.

Thanks in advance.