I've tried finding solutions to this for about a week now with no luck, so I'm turning to you guys.

After reformatting my laptop (Dell Inspiron 1420) due to wanting to clean it up, etc., Windows will fail to start up after the updates are installed/during installation. I've read around and all I could find is that an update may have been faulty. I'll try to explain what happens as best as I can.

Reformat
Download all necessary drivers
Windows updates
Restart to finish updates
Windows fails to start


After restarting to finish the updates and when windows fails to start, a very brief (split second) blue screen appears while the Vista logo is showing and the laptop appears to be loading. After the split second blue screen it takes me to the screen "Windows failed to start properly..." then asks me if I want to start in safe mode, restart at last known good configuration, etc.. I'll attempt the last known good configuration, no dice. I'll boot to the Vista CD to try system restore, no dice. It always fails to start, pretty much bottlenecking my laptop to not working at all.

As far as I know it's not a problem with the drivers. I've installed all the ones that I'm supposed to and in the correct order according to the Dell website. It runs perfectly fine until the updates to bring Windows up to date, then bam, this starts happening.

Any suggestions? I also recently reformatted my desktop and have had zero problems even after Windows updates, so I'm a bit lost, but my desktop is XP so I'm thinking the problem is a Vista specific update? Might be obvious lol, but I'm really not sure about this kind of thing.