Hi, this is probably not going to help very much, but I wanted to let you know that you're not on your own here. I had a very similar problem recently, which turned out to be a problem with the harddrive. I'm not sure what the problem was, but if I tried a different drive, it was fine. Problem was, I wanted to use that particular drive, which, incidentally was second hand. (fujitsu) I tried repartitioning, writing zero's, fdisk /mbr , you name it, every thing I could think of, I tried. There were no bad sectors on the drive at all, yet when I load xp it would not restart properly. I even tried a low level format as a last resort. In the end, Igave up and loaded win2000pro which was the nearest I could get to xp without it actually being xp. I needed to get the system up and running so could not spend any more time on it. I don't know why this kept happening, but it's fine with 2000 for some reason. Out of curiosity, I tried a number of different o/s's on the same hard drive and no problems with any of them. 2000pro is ntfs, so it's not a fat32/ntfs problem, which is what I first suspected. The system runs fine now. In my case, it definately was a hard drive problem as any other drive I installed was fine. Maybe someone can enlighten me also on this one? It aslo had 256mb Ram installed. Sorry I couldn't be of more help, and I no longer have the system here, but I would be grateful for an answer in case I'm ever stuck again. Michele Sayer --- Just to clarify; if you've got a virus, it's not from me! Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.716 / Virus Database: 472 - Release Date: 05/07/2004 Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to Digest mode - visit our web site: http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml