You have Win98, right? This is a fairly normal display during bootup, but it's supposed to be transient. After seeing this Windows should progress to the teal screen and continue with startup. One thing I did is embedded an ECHO ON statement in my Autoexec.bat file, so instead of a blank screen I'd see some progress. Personally I would say, it's probably not your video card... it's doing a great job of displaying a blinking cursor.
Just be ready... it could be any number of other problems in Windows, such as with your networking. FOR EXAMPLE, on my Win98SE, I found it would hang during boot unless it saw a Link signal on the LAN. So I had to use a hub, which powers up along with the computer, such that a Link signal would always be there. I think that this sort of thing can also be caused by some sort of DLL conflict within Windows, something you installed recently which is conflicting with something else.
Have you tried booting in SAFE mode? I'm just curious if that works. It will load way fewer DLL's in this mode, just the minimum.
During bootup, just after POST, it will say something like "Starting Windows 98". Then immediately you hit F8. A menu will appear. Arrow-down to choose SAFE mode and hit Enter.
Only thing is, once you're in SAFE mode, I don't have any other advice for you of what to do next... it's just a data point: it would confirm your computer isn't toally dead. I think the last time I had issues like this, I called Microsoft and paid the $35 for help, and they fixed it over the phone; well worth the $$.
I think Win98 may also still have a Bootlog feature. I think what you would do is bring up the menu like you would do to enter SAFE mode, but instead choose Command Prompt Only. This puts you into DOS. Then from this DOS prompt you would type,
and Windows will try to boot, but will hang as you said. But it will also deposit a BOOTLOG.TXT file in your C: root folder. What you would then do is again Boot to DOS again, and print that file via
Code:
more < c:\bootlog.txt
or
type c:\bootlog.txt
From the logfile you may be able to determine the last thing Windows was trying to do, and that may lead you to what the problem is.
Hope this helps,
-clintfan