I was provided this Dell Dimension 8200 to "clean off viruses." When it was presented to me I booted it up and immediately noticed the Windows splash screen was distored: It had vertical "bars" over the Windows image, as the cursor and over three of the four profiles. I could not access any of the profiles that had the "bars." When I accessed the remaining profile Windows would start to load, but would stop - freeze. There was a horizontal line of dots and the cursor still have the bars. I was able to boot into Safe Mode. Here I determined the installed Windows AntiSpyware Beta had current defs and did not find any faults. The Symantec AV Corporate was way out of date. I downloaded, installed and executed SpyBot, ClamAV and F-Prot. SpyBot found 90 items, all of which were cleaned. The AV products found nothing. I reformatted and reinstalled XP Pro. I patched to current, including SP-2. Everything seemed to be running fine. Today I installed Avast Home and everything has gone downhill. Booting to windows provides the images for the five users I created, but no names are by the users. In most cases the cursor is frozen. If it moves it will move briefly and then freeze. Going into Safe Mode I removed Avast and restarted the machine. Same result when loading windows - Profile images but no names. I've run fixmagi.com, but this faltered with an error. I didn't see an error, just that one had to be sent. I'm running McAfee Stinger now and having gone through the entire C drive has found nothing. The D drive simply holds files moved from C so that I could reformat C - My Documents and Favorites. What could this be? What should I try next? Thanks, Dave

Have you checked in the device manager to see if all the hardware is working properly?

It's the video card!!! I found one lying around and put it in and tada - windows boots right up. Got too focused on the user telling me it was viruses. Thanks for the redirection.

TWDAVE, I am glad to have been of help to you. Thanks a lot for letting me know how things worked out.