Ok I"ve researched about this issue before and it seems
like someone has had this problem before. However, I did
take the actions as requested in that thread and I sadly
have the problem still. Here's the info on the problem.

When booting up windows, I will receive the BIOS splash
screen, then when it's suppose to go to the "Windows
loading" splash screen, instead I get a cursor that flashes
around a bit then I get a MS-Dos looking Smiley face in
the bottom left corner of my screen. Black screen with a
white smiley face that looks like it's made up of Character
keys.

Obviously this is preventing Windows from booting.
Here's the funny part, when switching the bootable drive
from [1.4 Flopy A:] to [Lite DVD drive] and only when I
have the Win XP Home Edition CD in the DVD drive, it will
bypass the smiley face and will show

"Press Any Key to Boot from CD..."

Now if I don't press any key, it'll load windows just fine.
Now I have 2 IDE Hard Drives, one being the master, the
other being a slave. I have preformed a McAfee Virus scan
using the most up-to-date version and nothing was found
on any drive (aka C drive, D drive, A drive and the CD
drives) .

My course of action was to get into windows, back
everything up from the main drive to the slave hard drive
and then update BIOS. After updating BIOS, I was then
going to do either a "Repair Windows" and if that didn't
work, I was then going to do a Reformat.

Finally, here's the question:

Will this course of action resolve my issue? If not, then
what else could I do to try to get this virus (or at least I
think it's a virus or hack of some sort) out of my system?

"Things that happened prior to this smiley non-boot
issue"

I had left the computer on for about 5 hours, it's hard
wired into a Cable connection. The router is a wireless
modem. The Cable modem is a Comcast Digital Voice
Modem. (Motarolla Model) When I woke the computer
back up from it's sleep, my internet connection would not
work. I could only access "google" site, anything else
wouldn't work. I tried my laptop and the laptop's internet
would work just fine. I then restarted the computer, and
low and behold the smiley face.

Okay, there's one more thing I want to mention but I messed up on this post and didn't realize I could edit so I reposted another post down below.

Oh and one other thing, I have also tried flashing CMOS and I
get no results. I've also reverted to "Load Fail Safe Defults" in
BIOS and still no results, so I seem to think that this problem isn't related to
CMOS or BIOS. I'm curious if doing a fresh Windows
installation will resolve the problem. I hate to jump the gun
and reformat when I might not have too.

Now I'm not that great with typing, but here's what the smiley face kinda looks like. It's not made up of broken lines but this will give you an idea of what it looks like;
____
| . . |
| __ |
| \_/ |
\___/

Well doesn't seem like anyone is responding to my issue but that's okay. Strangely enough, after I was backing up all my content onto my slave drive, instead of doing the
windows reinstall, I figured to just set the booting back to the floppy disk drive and lo and behold....no smiley face. It was gone. Hopefully he'll stay away but just in case, I picked up a new WD SATA 3gb 500GB hard drive and I will do a fresh WinXP Professional install and slowly transfer all my files from the old IDE HD's onto the SATA HD.

If anyone has had this problem though, please leave a comment. I would like to find out how to prevent this from happening again.

be carefull transferring all your "old files" remembering that there is a problem "hidden in them" Did you ever check out the win.ini and autoexec.bat files to see if it had been overwritten with a phoney command?

yeah, everything seems to be fine. It's strange really, because after I backed up all my files from my master IDE hard drive to my slave IDE hard drive, the problem seem to go away. I do plan on doing a clean install on the new hard drive first and install a anti virus software with real time protection to make sure that as I'm transfering old files over to the new HD, I'm not transfering the virus. Thanks for the advice :D

I have had a similar problem and somehow figured out this fix: When I restart computer and get the face, I power off, then power on and hit F1 to enter setup HP machine). When the setup screen shows I hit esc and the computer boots normally. I may go weeks before it shows up again or several days in a row. Too busy to wipe the drives (plus not in the mood for yet another Windows restore) so have been living with this for a year. Oddly does not show up much. Hope this is of some benefit to you.