Strange things are afoot at the Circle K

I just applied Microsoft’s latest updates.  During the reboot process (required, btw) my laptop beeped twice.  Strange — it’s never done that before.  Then, my laptop booted fine, except — THE SCREEN WAS BLACK.  The laptop seemed to think I either had no display or was using an external video device.  I tried using the FN-F4 to manage the display through the hardware shortcut keys, but it didn’t work.  I ended up having to yank the battery of the laptop to get it to power down completely.  Re-inserting the battery and hitting the power button, things seems to be working correctly.  Full video — everything.

Let me know if anyone else experiences something like this with today’s updates from Microsoft.  It could simply be a hardware issue, but it’s never acted like this before, and it only did it after applying the updates.