I currently have vista running on my Dell machine, but when it starts it gets all the way to the Vista icon glowing before giving me a complete black screen. It starts in safe mode and allows me to go into setup. Any idea's how to fix this please?

Most commonly this is caused by corrupted drivers - with video drivers being the most common reason for that. You should be able to install an updated version in Safe Mode (depending on the manufacturer of the driver). If it won't install, then you'll have to uninstall the driver software (and the driver in Safe Mode) in order to boot into normal mode and then install the driver.

Another frequent cause of this problem is a corruption of certain sections of the hard drive (or a dying hard drive). So, the other thing to do would be to run the "Repair the Computer" thing that presents on top of the Safe Mode choice in most systems - and then select Startup Repair. If this choice isn't available, you'll have to boot from a Vista DVD to access it. More information on this process is here: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial148.html

If both of the above procedures don't fix the error, then I'd recommend a bootable hard drive diagnostic (usually available for free from the manufacturer of your hard drive). A list of the more common one's is here: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic28744.html

I uninstalled the Video Driver and the computer started ok but it seems that when i go to reinstall the video driver i get the same problem