glad you got it fixed but you should never need to take the power cable out to turn off the Wii console.
Holding down the power button for about 5 to 10 seconds on the front of the console always turns it
off for me no matter what kind of freeze or screen I have experienced.
Also keep in mind that there are a few PAL games which will not display correctly unless you have the
settings right and/or have a TV that accepts a PAL signal(A lot of newer LCD's allow this) but even so
when you go to reset the game or back out to the Wii menu it may give a black screen as the TV is
still trying to use a PAL signal on the NTSC Wii Menu. This would require you to power off the console
by holding down the power button on the front of it, not on the Wii Remote.
Of Course this is all assuming you're running PAL games from an NTSC console.
EDIT: I'm an idiot, didn't pay attention that you were trying to force PAL on an NTSC game. Sorry about that.