Originally Posted by
redburgundy
It's hard to imagine any relationship between rebooting problems and having a device attached to the USB port.
What operating system?
Did you shut down and take the battery out, then replace the battery and try to start it again?
Common with certain drive encryption applications (i.e. PointSec). In laymans terms, they ride over the BIOS but under the OS. Newer laptops that typically are set to automatically check for bootable USB devices may have issues if said devices are left connected. The latest patches/updates to the encryption s/w should correct this behavior.
If you don't have any encryption s/w installed, then the issue could be completely unrelated to the USB device. Coincidences have been known to happen.
I presume that you're using XP. On that assumption, right when the BIOS screen disappears on boot up, press F8 repeatedly to get to the advanced boot menu. Choose Safe Mode. If you can boot successfully, reboot and boot normally. If it still BSOD's, repeat the F8 step and choose Last Known Good Configuration. If you installed anything (driver, app, etc.) prior to rebooting that caused the BSOD, this
should bounce you back to the config on your last successful boot.
If that doesn't work, you need to have someone locally check it out.
EDIT: Noticed you already did Safe Mode so ignore that part. But I'm not sure what all you did that was covered by the "etc."