Windows 7 STUCK on welcome screen

Hello all, my girlfriend and I are having a major problem with our little HP Laptop that we bought from Best Buy about a month ago.

this is the laptop http://www.bestbuy.com/site/HP+-+Pav...&skuId=9705406

We've been using it lightly for about a month. It's not our primary computer and we don't do much other than schoolwork on it. We haven't downloaded anything on it other than Google Chrome, CCleaner and Steam. This evening my girlfriend went to turn it on and the damn thing won't go any farther than the Windows 7 welcome screen. My girlfriend and I have seperate user accounts on the computer and the little icons for our accounts don't load, the power button in the corner doesn't show up...it's just the Windows 7 background and cursor arrow. It does this weather you choose Safe or Normal mode at startup. I entered Windows 7 System Recovery mode by pressing F8 and tried pretty much every option there that seemed pertenant in the advanced boot options menu; I tried the system recovery option and it didn't show me any recovery options...it just went straight to the same screen it always does.

Does anyone have any ideal what is causing this and what we might be able to do? I'm going to take it to Best Buy tommorow but this is driving me nuts!

I can't get the system recovery options menu to run. When I try to start it up, it just reboots the computer and goes back to the screen in question.