Managed to find a Vista rescue disc, and have now booted with that and restored to a point at the start of the month. So far, so good. Everything seems to be working again. I won't be updating the vc driver just yet, though! At least update the chipset drivers+os first.

Read some places that a windows update can cause this, but that is usually on laptops. This is a home-built PC. Reason I think it is a driver problem is because keyboard and mouse worked @ boot/bios, and obviously because they are working again now after the restore.