Greetings!

The visuals on boot may be a hijack setting. You should check your config.ini file to see if you have that option set.

The main problem sounds like it might be a problem on the hard drives. They may require a manual disk check (fsck). Get the boot log through hyperterminal, and if there are any errors when this happens, please post them here.

To resolve it, though, you will likely need to drop to the shell prompt - something you cannot do on the consumer version. You may want to load the developer version - it gives access to a lot of troubleshooting utilities.

If you do see disk errors, the solution is typically a manual fsck of the drives.