[markw10]

I have a 2 month old MacBook Pro. It has worked fine but last night I left it on with a lot of applications open. This morning all the apps were locked up and I was just getting the beachball. I was unable to quit any of them or even get to the point of restarting the computer. Once I did I was unable to boot. I get to the logon screen where I enter my password. I get all the way to the screen where I have my background but all I have is the upper right part of the screen (around a square inch) where you see the blue magnifying glass that you use for Spotlight. I get nothing else, no dock, pull down menus, etc. I have gone as far as putting the OS Tiger Boot Disk in and using the Option key to start from CD but then during the boot I get that black screen where it says I need to restart my computer and to hold down the power button.
Any ideas of what I can do?

[Waragainstsleep]

You can try single user mode. Boot holding apple-S, you will get a command prompt after a minute. Type:

fsck -fy

This will check for drive problems, and fix them if possible.
Is it your original restore disc you are booting from? A generic Tiger is NOT universal so has no x86 binaries and will not run any Intel Mac. If the original is kernel panicing your 'book, this suggests a more serious problem. Take it to an AASP.
If you have another Mac, boot the MBP in firewire target mode, then move all the prefs from the Preferences folder in the library foldeer from your user account. Copy them somewhere safe then delete the originals. You may find it will boot properly after that.