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!