Monitor shuts off after windows loading screen?

Anyone know the issue? My computer was working completely fine yesterday and I was playing Half life 2 all day. I exited out the game and went to download the free Deadspace from EA then turned off my monitor to return later. When I went to turn back on my monitor I was getting no image at all. Not even moving my mouse or keyboard made it turn back on so it wasn't on stand by. Restarted my computer and now after windows boot screen the monitor just shuts off?? My computer boots perfectly fine in safe mode but when I boot it regularly the monitor shuts off. I tried turning off all my services and start up programs and still nothing?

Could my of graphics card just died like that even though it was showing no signs of dying? I mean maybe certain games chugged a little bit more than usual but I'm not really sure it was that big of deal. It is about 5 years old. It was a Zotac GTX295.

Any input? Anyone had this problem and it WASN'T a dead graphics card?

Reset CMOS? Reinstall drivers in safe mode?

in safe mode uninstall the display drivers and reboot then download the latest drivers and install them make sure to select the clean install option.

@04dcarraher: you mean my display monitor drivers right? not my graphics card drivers?

edit: Actually decided to try to roll back on my drivers and it turned on normally! What could have caused my issues in the drivers? Should I not update my nvidia drivers again or what?

You just had corrupted drivers as soon as they loaded into windows it screwed up. It happens just reinstall them to fix it

What is the OS you are using ? if vista and higher i believe there is an option to run the OS in 640x400 resolution from the boot screen , see if that works .

It could be almost anything hardware related going bad. PSU, memory, gpu, or mobo. Or could just simply be that your default windows resolution somehow got changed to one your monitor does not support. Or driver related, maybe, but wouldn't be my first bet.

Its quite simple really, that happens when your windows is running on a resolution the monitor doesn't support, maybe you accidentally changed its resolution. Or a game did that's is possible. when that happens just get on Safe Mode and change the resolution. Happens allot of times when I plug clients Pcs on my working Monitor...