Hello All, I'm new to this sort of thing so treat me as a novice. Briefly, I use my system in my home only but it suffered total failure just prior to Xmas 04 and Dell helped me restore it by re-formatting my 120Gb HD and re-installing W2K using the disc they supplied with my system back in 2001. They also took me through flashing the BIOS to its latest available specification 09. I decided to download SP4 but have stayed well away from the infamous KB835732 with its associated problems that many (inc. me in the past) have experienced. My system ran nicely for a while during January but it started to suffer from unexpected reboots that occurred up to 4 times in the first 15 minutes after initial start up but after that the system would remain up stable. Further consultations with Dell failed to resolve the issue so I got my spade and fork out and dug a bit deeper for myself. I recently "discovered" the Event Viewer in Admin Tools and I found a line that corresponded with the most recent reboot and checked its Properties and there it stated that "This PC was shutdown/rebooted because a cluster had not started - error 0x000000b8". I discovered a Microsoft article (ID 318988) and read the Resolution section thoroughly, then taking the plunge, I entered into Regedit as follows:- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services but this was as far as I could get despite the path in the MS Article telling me to go on to \Clusnet\Start then to double click the Start value and type 3 in the Value Data box, apparently problems occur if this value is set to 1 (one). All this said and done I had to back out of the registry (having changing nothing) leaving things as they were. Obviously I'm running OK at the moment but I leave my system running 24/7 once it's stable and I can work it hard no ill effects. My point is, can anyone out there take me that bit farther to finally overcome the unreliable startup problem on my system? Roy

According to that article, SP4 fixes the problem. Did you install it after downloading?

Hello Jennifer, A good thought but Yes, it appears to be fully installed OK because I couldn't upgrade my IE & OE to 6.0 without W2K being upgraded with SP4. Having said this, the only way that I know its installed is that SP4 shows up on my System Properties. Thanks for your reply! Kind regards Roy

Well, it looks as though I have stumped (a cricketing term for being run-out) everyone out there on this topic so I shall just have to leave my system running 24/7 until some anti-virus update or the like requires me to restart my pc at which point I'll just have to hope that it settles down quickly after that. Nevertheless, I'll still be watching out for anyone's advice on my query via this excellent means of communication. Have a good weekend everybody, Roy

rollback the install of sp4 and do it again. Seeing it in system properties doesnt mena its fully isntalled

Hi ooglenz1, Thanks for your suggestion but I don't know how to find and uninstall SP4 (it doesn't show in Add/Remove Programs) can you advise in detail please? Best regards RoyS