Screen Flashes Black On And Off

i have an emachines m5105 laptop. i just reinstalled windows xp professional on it, went through the whole process, everything was fine. i installed windows updates, all the emachines drivers, then aol messenger, a couple of simple programs, then adobe dreamweaver, reader, the google toolbar and microsoft office (in that order). by the time i was done, the laptop screen flashes to an almost black screen, on and off, constantly. i uninstalled office and dreamweaver, since that was not happening before i installed those programs, but i'm still having the same problem.