Weird display & screen freezing (but not in Safe Mode)

[bluegreen1]

While working, my Win7 desktop suddenly displayed multiple desktops (about 6 of them in 2 columns) and a message to "check with your hardware vendor"... the only way to do anything was to shut down with the power button, which I did.

I then booted into Safe Mode and checked for driver updates, and updated the video card. When I booted back to regular mode, the screen displayed normally, and worked well for a while, but then froze and was completely unresponsive. It is now freezing almost immediately after booting. (But I haven't seen multiple desktops displayed again in regular mode since updating the driver. And Safe Mode still works fine.)

(Since I am wrapping up tax stuff, I thought I would just work in Safe Mode and deal with this later, but I don't see a button to Sleep or Hibernate in Safe Mode, and I don't want to keep shutting the laptop down completely when I'm away from it for a while.)

I will truly appreciate any direction on this problem! Thank you very much.

 

[bluegreen1]

I updated Chrome in Safe Mode, and then booted to regular mode where there were Windows updates to install, so I hoped this would fix the problem. But the computer crashed again and gave me .dmp file after reboot. I have no clue about how to open a dump file, but saw elsewhere on this site that such should be sent to a compressed folder, and then attached here. (I hope someone can figure out how to read the file.) The screen also again displayed images of six desktops in two columns. I wonder what can be done to correct this.