Everytime I start up, the system freezes unless I hit the ESC key when the Win98 splash screen comes up. Have tried patch from M/soft but still does it. Had this problem quite a while and can get around it, but its quite annoying that I can't turn the computer on and walk away. PS This originally happened when I updated the drivers for my Nvidia card. Shutdown is not affected. Thanks

Your P.S. should give you a clue. Try uninstalling the updated Nvidia drivers and/or use one of the generic Windows video drivers and see if you still have this issue. You can also hit the F8 key when Windows starts booting to bring up the menu. Then enable boot logging. Then looking at this bootlog.txt file may show you which driver(s) may be "hanging" your system.

thanks rick. I did try uninstalling the drivers & going back to the previous version when it happened but to no avail. I'll check my bootlog.