...  my computer seems to be failing.  It is an eMachines, running 
Windows XP, SP2, with 700-odd meg of additional RAM.  Sorry, but I 
couldn't find this failure in the archives.

The symptoms are, when I start to power up I get a rapid-fire knocking 
or clicking sound through the speakers.  Then if I try to close a 
program that's in my boot menu, the system chatters and the command 
flits by too quickly to click on it -- and keeps on doing that.  If I 
try the "start" button, the computer immediately goes into standby 
mode.  The other symptom is, when I open a program like email (currently 
using Mozilla T'bird) the computer opens the same message several 
times.  So far, I have been able to check this process using 
<ctrl><alt><del> but I had to do that twice last time in order to close 
the repeat message. 

The problem is intermittent, that is, the computer doesn't show these 
symptoms each and every time I boot up -- just often enough to cause 
this ol' lady some more gray hairs!  It's been going on for about ten 
days now.  I have scanned for viruses and other malware several times; 
it doesn't seem to help and my antivirus software (PC-Cillin) can't find 
anything.  I went into the appropriate 'regedit' files and everything 
looks normal.

I suspect this is a hardware situation, but if I'm wrong please let me 
know and I'll run it past the PCSOFT folks.  Many thanks!

Joyce in southeast Ohio

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