Boot up skips loading screen

so, i NEVER shut down my computer, it's forever on sleep mode. i finally had to turn it off to move it into a new apartment. long story short, the computer turns on fine, i get the desktop and hard drive icons. but the keyboard and cursor wont show. even more interesting is that, on boot up, i get no happy face mac os icon and loading bar, just a momentary blue screen and str8 to the desktop, no cursor or keyboard action. any suggestions?

I'm working with a Graphite G4 with OSX 10.4 Tiger.

put the keyboard usb cable in a different slot

do you get a light on the caps key?

also consider booting from the tiger CD and run disk utility from the menu (assuming the mouse starts working when you boot from the deisk)