ok, this one has really got me pulling my hair out. it began initially with a registry error. after the reg restore, every time win98 boots, it will, at some time in the actual win98 startup, beep once (on pc spkr) and then enter power suspend mode. i know it's going into power suspend mode because if the gui has actually come up when it does it, it displays a window telling me so. upon further investigation, i find that my autoexec.bat appears to have been altered, and after every reboot, has been returned to the modified version. virus scan detects nothing. playing with both win98 & bios power management settings makes no difference. working within dos, the trend chipaway antivirus finally says there might be a boot sector virus. so, a sys restore doesn't help. a format c: makes the disk tell fdisk it's not a fat system, but the drives still appear when slaved to another hard disk. so, fdisk /mbr, then a repartitioning of the hard drive. reformat, using a win98se boot disk. drives appear to be normal. but when i go to install win98se again, get a lot of irregular beeping and stalling within the install program. all the parts are compatible, and have been running flawlessly for 3 years. system is a pIII-450 on an ASUS p2B-F motherboard, 160mb of pc100 ram, maxtor 28gb 7200rpm hard drive, power source is 350w. i haven't found a virus description even remotely like this, and am beginning to think i'm going to have to disassemble the machine, part-by-part to see if a component is somehow doing this. i'm inclined to say it's software/firmware b/c of the autoexec's constantly being rewritten, though. all thoughts are welcome! thanks, john

Hey John!, your problem looks known to me :) I mean, I never experienced anything like that but I'd throw you some tips: 1. Disable the Trend-ChipAway virus checking!, it's useless!!! 2. Try installing a clean Win98SE and *right after that* the motherboard drivers. If you don't have them already, download them first before doing anything. They are the key to make Win98 correctly detect/handle your devices. 3. Enable power saving features in your BIOS so Win98 can handle them properly too. Whether this does help or not, I'd like you to email me to tell me how's going! :) Andrés

I had a similar problem, and I have 3 words. Dust and fans. If you've had your computer for 3 years with no problems, that's an indication that it needs cleaning ( unless you do an annual clean-up on your systems physically ). I kept hanging and going into BIOS. What it was, is that the connectors and cards were dirty and had to be cleaned and re-inserted. I would try that before getting into all the convoluted software cures ( after trying the simple ones ). my two cents.