Black screen

Hi,
I'm having a problem with my Acer Aspire laptop (with Windows Vista)- it starts up normally, I get the screen with the little green scrolling bar for start up and then the screen goes black. It makes the nice little start up sound after going black, so I know the comp is still working, but nothing is visible. I've tried ctrl+alt+del and pretty much every other button on the keypad to no avail.
I have also pressed F8 during start up to start in last known good configuration and to search for problems (it doesn't find any and continues start up to black screen again). The other big hitch is that when I start it in safe mode, the screen is visible and normal, but the keyboard and mouse don't work! I think this is probably a Vista problem, from when new updates came through recently or perhaps a driver problem? I'm not very savvy if you couldn't already tell.
If anyone has any ideas on how to fix this I would really appreciate it! Thanks a ton!

Beth