Windows 98 booting only into safe mode

My win 98 machine will not boot into normal mode. I can get it to a DOS prompt or safe mode, but when i try normal mode it stops with a blinking cursor in the top-left of the screen.

I have not loaded any programs, or installed any new hardware. Just turned on one day and started this.

From Safe Mode, i looked at the device manager and saw no problems. There was no error message in safe mode which gave away a possible problem.

The machine is about 2 years old a Pentium II…