How to increase brightness in Windows 7 and for the Option sceen?

Question

I have an 15" early 2011 MBP with Snow Leopard and reccently installed 64-bit Windows 7 Pro using an upgrade disk I had. Apparently the backup/upgrade disk would allow me to do a clean install despite not having a previous version of windows to base it off of now that XP is no longer supported.
I had no initial problems installing Windows and getting the bootcamp software fully updated (3.2 I believe,) but while I was in the process of updating all of my windows software things started getting messy. I managed to update some windows functions, but eventually I ran into a real problem after downloading what I believe to be a service pack (not sure which one) that was recommended by the windows updater. After downloading the update, the computer needed to be reset.
Upon resetting the laptop, I found that the option screen that lets you choose which partition to boot into is completely black. I can tell that the display is on because the screen is somewhat brighter than when the laptop is off, but I can't see anything.
For grins, I tried seeing if hitting the right arrow key and then enter would take me to my windows partion, which it did. The loading screen (with the windows icon approaching and illuminating) is completely fine; however, after that loading screen, the screen appears to turn off (nothing, zilch, nada.) I let it sit there for about 5 minutes or so and still had nothing. Upon hard-resetting my computer, I found that when I tried booting windows again it gave me the options to boot into safe mode. Safe mode works and gives full brightness, normal mode does not.
I looked on the forums and saw that deleting C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ATIKMDAG.SYS could fix the issue. I downloaded Paragon, mounted the bootcamp partition and removed the offending file from my mac partition.
The option screen was still black, but the login screen appeared after the computer tried to finish patching (the service pack patch failed.) The problem then was that the screen was incredibly dim at full brightness. I had control of the brightness settings via fn+f1/f2. All it took was dimming the screen 3 notches in order to make it go completely black. I logged in and tried updating the radeon video card, reset the computer and found myself back at the off screen issue mentioned earlier after the windows loading screen.
I have yet to check, as this process has been extremely tiring and annoying, but I think I can fix the completely dead screen by removing the driver again. I gave this long story to show what I have done so hopefully I cam get a response I
My burning questions are:
What do I need to do to get the screen back to full brightness when I do get my laptop to boot into windows successfully?
How do I fix my option screen to actually show up again instead of blindly picking the partition I want to boot into?
Are there any windows updates that I need to avoid for 64-bit windows 7? I'm guessing whatever service pack it was I downloaded is one of them.

Answer 1

I don't use the search engine, so I'm afriad I don't have direct experience here.
What I'd probably do is modify the app so that it looks at the Host data to determine which directory it should point to for graphics, formatting, etc. You could also use the obj.conf with variables to pull graphics from directories appropriately branded. Something like:
1) Create "additional doc directory" for images
2) Find the entry in the obj.conf that points to the new directory
3) Modify the path to something like /path/to/$host/images
4) Make sure you create directories like:
/path/to/foobar.com/images/
/path/to/www.foobar.com/images/
/path/to/baz.com/images/
/path/to/www.baz.com/images/