When I hold down the ctrl key during bootup the comp boots into Windows, no startup options appear. I went into msconfig/general/advanced and ticked 'enable startup menu' and still no joy. Only other strange behavior recently is that Norton AV 2003 (I know, I know) won't let me run a scan, keeps telling me I'm not authorized and offers a click-though to Norton's site. The fix on Norton's site doesn't work. Not sure if the problems are related.

Why are you holding the CTRL key...to get into the BIOS? Is that the key you're supposed to hit? Try DEL instead Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz 512MB PC3200 Asus Ti4200 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro

Jam, Marrtha is looking for the Windows Startup menu. Try starting to hold down the left Ctrl key just after the memory count completes. On mine I must be holding it down while the second screen shows the words "Verifying DMI pool data..." Otherwise try hitting the F8 key when you see "Windows 98 is starting" or once per second after the memory count completes. HTH Bryan

I'm not trying to get into the bios, I'm trying to get to the startup menu. You know, where you have choices to boot into safe mode, normal mode, command prompt only, etc. I can get into the bios with the del key just fine. You apparently misunderstood my post, but thanks for attempting to help.

Thanks for the response, Bryan. I've tried holding down the left ctrl key, the right ctrl key, and hitting the f8 key repeatedly. On separate boot tries, of course, not all on the same boot-up. No joy with any of these, comp still boots right on into Win98SE. I'm running scandisk on that computer right now. If I could get to the startup menu I could select command prompt and try scanreg /fix, or scanreg /restore to see if it fixes the Norton problem.

One trick you could try if having trouble timing the F8 key. Ensure that bios is set to boot from a floppy before the hard drive. Place a non-bootable, or even blank, floppy in the drive. When you get the non system disk error, remove the floppy and press F8 twice quickly.

Thanks for the suggestion Rimfire. I followed your suggestion and it still booted right into 98SE. On a whim, I switched keyboards. Still won't go into startup menu when I hold ctrl key down while booting. About ready to give up and just reformat and install everything again. If I contact Norton they will just tell me to reinstall Norton, and I'd rather reformat and reinstall everything than try to get Norton off a system to reinstall it.