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XP Professional - Hangs at startup

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by jgillette

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Pentium II 400MHZ, 192MB Ram, 80GB HD. I've been running XP for a few months now, no real problems. I upgraded from my 10GB HD a couple of weeks ago and all seemed well for about a week. Then I installed DirectX 9.0 and the trouble started. It would get to the login screen, and play the startup music. Then after I clicked on my name it just sat for a few minutes, and finally showed the wallpaper- but nothing else. I could get into task manager, tried ending explorer and restarting it withno luck. I succesfully booted into safe mode, tried a system restore and it still did the same thing. Tried going through msconfig and went through and did a selective startup, but no matter which options I unchecked (including all of them), it did the same thing. Still only could boot into safemode. After exhausting everything I could think of, I reformatted and reinstalled XP Pro. Then it was fine again for a few days, but after installing McAfee virus scan yesterday it did the same exact thing again, and I tried all of the same troubleshooting. Finally I had to reformat yet again. I do not see a common denominator for this issue, as I had installed completely different apps each time immediately before the problem started. I went through all of the troubleshooting steps built into XP. Being not all that inclined from the hardware end of things, could this be a symptom of a bad hard drive? I just don't understand why it would work fine for days at a time and then do this after an app was installed if it was a hardware issue. I'll try any suggestions. THANKS IN ADVANCE!

7 replies

by borginva

What I would suggest you do is copy all the files related to Win98's System File Checker (sfc.exe). Copy all the files with sfc in it. Put it in a directory on XP. I use it myself. Love it. Hate the XP's version.
Set it up to monitor the change of add/deleted/modified files.
If you decide to give XP another install, copy over SFC and set it up. Run it. It will probably detect changed files because you are using XP over 98. Just accept all changes (you have the option to make the answer you choose the same for other files).
Then install XP-SP1. Run SFC again. Accept all changed files.
Now, however you can, backup your files. Especially your system and system32 directories (I know some files you can not copy over but as long as you get those dlls backed up).
Install your programs one at a time and then run SFC. See what changes. Maybe put back your newer dll over the old one that the program installed.
I know this is long and maybe a pain, but I ahve been using SFC since 98. I useit on my 2k and XP systems. I always use it after ANY install of ANYTHING. I install and uninstall a lot of programs. I have rarely encountered any serious problems.
Why do this method? Well, after installing something, you can see if newer files have been overwritten with other ones, and if any files were deleted.
If you do this and later find yourself in safe mode again, go into SM and run SFC. See if anything changed or was deleted during your last reboot.
Yeah, give this hard drive a scandisk as well. Let it run over night so you do not have to wait during the day for it (or vise versa if you are a night person like me).
I hope something here helps.

by jamesco-nz

This could also be a case of bad RAM. Download a little freeware utility called memtest-86 (not sure of the address, but do a search in Yahoo or Google). I had similar problems, however not long after I started getting blue screen stop errors. Triedtaking a 256MB stick out, and it worked. No probs whatsoever. With the stick I took out, Memtest showed a total of 3800 odd errors, and proved what I thought. Give it a go.

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