My Thinkpad 1400 was fine in August when I came back from vacation after using it. I put it in the closet and now that I'm going to use it again over winter break took it back out. The battery doesn't hold a charge, so I had to plug it in. When I start it, the hard drive light stays on and few programs run. I've shut down everything non-essential in the list of running programs (Task manager?). Nothing has been changed since the last time I used it. No power management stuff is on. -Diskspace runs, but slowly. -Scandisk starts and I get the initial screen, but it just waits and waits to access the hard disk to run the FAT test. Eventually, I get a message saying that SD can't access the hard drive, please stop other program, etc. - Norton Systemworks seems to start, but nothing ever shows up. It isn't in the Task Manager, but if I shut down the computer I have to "End Task" it. - I can dial up. Netscape starts, I get a window, it hangs at "Sending Request to www.yahoo.com". Data is going back and forth. I uninstall Norton Utils since that was hanging, but no change. In Safe Mode, the hard drive light is normal and everything runs fine. In selective startup, it seems like something in "Load all Windows Drivers" is the problem, but not loading that puts me back into Safe Mode. Using msconfig and disabling win.ini and system.ini (and then disabling autoexec.bat) doesn't fix the problem. I have no idea where to go to from here. Any help is greatly appreciated. Beth

Hi Beth. Try this Go to Start, then Run, type SFC then make sure the dot is in Scan for altered files, then scan files, and let windows fix any that may be corrupt. Have a nice day.

Check in cmos to make sure cache ram is enabled.

I tried running SFC and fixed the following files: mscat32.dll mssip32.dll mssign32.dll cryptui.dll cryptnet.dll cryptext.dll softpub.dll msoss.dll Unfortunately, the problem is still there. Also, when booting up, it's looking for csinsm32.exe and can't find it. It's not on my C or Windows CD. Any other ideas?

>Check in cmos to make sure cache ram is enabled. There aren't any cache options in the BIOS. Or is there somewhere else I should be looking?

A search in this forum for SFC will turn up lots. And in that ~lots~, there will be some "Woah, wait a minute" fix issues with the checker. Worth checking out.

One mystery solved: CSINSM32 is Norton Cleansweep. I uninstalled it when that was hanging up; guess there's something left over. No big deal, I'm going to restore Norton. It looks like SFC worked fine. It just didn't solve the problem.