win98

It sounds as though you are having a video driver or resource problem. You should go ahead and try to troubleshoot this in Safe Mode, although your display will only be 16 colors\ VGA, this mode is for trouble shooting problems such as yours.

First, I would check for any conflicts in the Control Panel, System applet, Resources.

Second, I would make sure that the drivers installed for the video card are indeed for that card--physically check the card and while in Control Panel, see which drivers are installed. Try updating to more recent drivers from the manufacturer's site.

Once you have no conflicts and the proper video drivers installed, you should be able to start up in the regular Windows mode. If not, then run Msconfig and remove various things from the start up and add them back in one at a time to see if anything there is causing your problem (doubtful).

Please post comments on what else you have done so we can give better help info to you.

This will occur in safe mode,because the drivers are loaded in a minimal state,which would be the VGA display in 16 bit

Try troubleshooting the problem you are having with hanging by disabling power management and fast find

Check the anti-virus configuration to see if this is causing the problem at startup,by disabling from MSCONFIG

Check the video driver manufacturers web site and update the drivers

In addition to what Lizzy and soulrider gave you;

Make sure that you update the chipset drivers for your motherboard.
If you need help identifying what drivers you need, check out www.motherboards.org
They can help you identify your motherboard, and link you to web sites to get the latest drivers.

For your video driver, start with either the card mfgs web site, or www.driverguide.com

I recommend that you perform the following after getting the updated driver files;

1 from safe mode, in display properties/settings, accept the 16 color 640*480 mode.
Reboot.

2. Install the chipset drivers per the mfg proceedure.

3. Install DirectX 7 or 8

4. Install the video card driver

5. Make sure that your monitor is detected correctly.

Can you remember any software or hardware changes that may have occoured just before this problem started?

Windows 98 may "lock" up with more than 511MB of memory installed. So, if you just added RAM, or other hardware, it may be the cause.

Unfortunately, some Windows Updates also mess up your PC.

Chas

I had a similar problem. It was a corrupt entry in the registry.

Start the computer in dos mode (F8) and run a program called Scanreg.exe. When you are prompted restore the last registry that booted sucessfully.