Screen Blanks when Win 8 loads

Because of the virus news, I just installed 2 IE10 updates. Upon reboot of the Win 8 (x64) machine to finish the update installs, my screen goes black (Switches between black and dark gray on aprox 1-sec cycles) just before the Win log-in screen. The cursor is all that shows, so I can neither see to log-in nor navigate.

1) Suspected it was an IE update conflict with my NVIDIA drivers, but switched BIOS & monitor to the on-board video with no change (NIVIDA drivers and cards still installed).

2) With XP, I would boot into Safe Mode and do a system restore to remove the offending updates, but Safe Mode in this case also produces a blank screen (Took forever to find the right time to hit SFT-F8 to get the start-up options).

3) Attempts at System Restore using a recovery disk returned the error, "To use System Restore, you must specify which windows installation to restore. Restart this computer and select an O...S..., and then select System Restore". This is on a single boot/OS computer, as it came from the factory and I can find no boot options to select a windows installation.

Unless it's is the only option not interested in Refresh or Reset as reinstalling progs and resetting preferences will take a couple of days work. Will also lose some data, though most is backed up.

Any help in getting rid of the offending updates will be appreciated. Thanks

 

Turned out the problem was with Intel's Smart Response Technology (Combo of HDD & SSD for booting). I did find "fixes" (Probably temporary), but this being my business computer reliability was more important than speed. I removed the SSD, reset BIOS for normal SATA drives, reformatted the HDD and reinstalled all. Much time lost, but the computer runs well.