Thank you, I will try this.

Further to my original post, my computer turned itself off (or put itself in sleep mode) overnight and when I powered it back up this morning, everything was working...

Thank you for your swift response, I am going through your suggestions in the order that you listed them.
Dell/Alienware have never officially supported Windows 10 on my machine, however as I said,...

Hi, I have an Alienware m18x R2 laptop that has been successfully running Windows 10 Pro (upgraded automatically from Windows 7 Ultimate) for the last couple of years.

Intel Core i7 - 3820QM
16GB...

Actually I just got in, managed to log into safe mode in the second user account I created and took control of c: and login screen came back, just trying to get start menu back now

Still having issues

The add user option doesn't work, found somewhere that told me to use Win+R then type "control userpasswords2" this brought up a box where I was able to add another user.
...

I am wondering if because I only had the one user account plus my the installation admin account would I have had this issue if I had other accounts active?

OK, good to know, thank you. I think setting up a new user is probably the way to go.

Unfortunately no back ups that I'm aware of. If setting up a new account would work, I could I set up a new account with the same name as my old one?

I'll try running system restore again, haven't actually tried it from within safe mode.

First time I tried it was from windows install media, which found a restore point but produced an error...

So I have a Dell Alienware M18Xr2 which I upgraded from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 10.

Everything was fine until yesterday.

I'm building an app in Visual Studio, and was getting an access...