After running perfectly for 3 years, my PII/96 Mb laptop running Win98 SE froze up. Ever since, booting Windows is extremely slow (approx. 3 hours), and Windows runs equally slow (15 min. for the opening guitar strum sound to complete and 90 seconds for the mouse to respond). Safe Mode boots and runs normally, as does DOS. When I run the step-by-step boot routine, all drivers load without problem. Boot log shows the same. The slow-mo problem starts when Windows itself is loaded. I booted with the emergency disk and scanned for viruses, and no viruses were found. I ran hardware diagnostics and processor and RAM check out OK. Finally, I reformatted the hard disk and re-installed Windows. In fact, I have deleted and reinstalled the partition, formatted the hard disk, and reinstalled Windows from the original CD now 7 times. The problem still persists.

could be the hard drive and the system is having trouble recalling information from it.

Hi Island Guy, jay amaro, hi everybody, Have a look at Device Manager: do you have all of your drives there, especially the CD-Rom? Not sure but isn't your disk used in MSdos compatibility mode? Below are some lines from my RegInfo.bat utility: ----- -=NoIDE Bad_IDE (Check)=- -=Key HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\IOS, Value "NoIDE" -=Key HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\hdc\0000, Value "Bad_IDE" Existence of NoIDE Value or Bad_IDE Data often means low performance/missing CD -Drive due to IDE issue, the comp working in MSDos Compatibility Mode. NoIDE Windows Bug (Ws9x-ME), Symptoms: -CDRom drive disappears, -DeviceManager Primary and Secondary ID Controller appear with yellow exclamati on mark, -In DeviceManager, under "Performance", all HD's appear in compatibility mode. (http://powerjoe.tripod.com/noide.html http://www.longshome.com/ http://www.geocities.com/~budallen/mscompat.html http://www.geocities.com/~budallen/mscompat2.html) ----- HTH Have a good day, Gérard from Paris, France

Try disconnecting the cdrom drive. It is ingnored in safe mode.

I was given a laptop that behaved like yours. It had 2 anti virus programs running plus Kazaa. Took about 15 minutes to boot. Did a clean minimal install of the OS and now it is almost good as new. You mention that it is OK in safe mode and DOS. The thing that I would check is first what applications are running and how much memory do you really have. It appears that the system is swapping everything to the hard drive.