My buddy runs XP Home on a Sony Vaio with a 2MHz P4.  His problems started
when he installed an RF wireless mouse.  Now when it boots, it starts to go
into XP, flashes an error message on the screen for a fraction of a second,
and restarts the boot process from ROM.

  I'm able to boot successfully from a Win98 boot floppy, and from a copy of
XP Pro installed to the same drive.  At this point, there's nothing to
suggest that any of the hardware is not performing as it should.

  He thinks maybe at one point he accidentally let it try to boot from the
mouse driver diskette.  I once got a boot-sector virus that way, but Norton
gives both the driver disk and the hard drive clean bills of health, so
we've pretty much ruled out a virus as the cause.

  Booting into Safe Mode and Debugging mode have the same results.  Booting
with logging appears to create a "0.log" file whose size is 0 bytes.

  Can anyone *at least* suggest a way to capture the error message?  Or
suggest a way to repair the XP Home installation?

Dave Gillett

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