My mother in law had some viruses that she thought she had taken care of by installing Norton AV 2002. To install NAV she had to uninstall Mcafee AV. Now she gets a "windows protection error" upon startup. It says to restart the computer and then she gets to the startup options. She has no problems getting into safe mode. I have found this help www.ati.com/support/infobase/3233.html and this will work until you restart or shutdown the computer and try to restart. I am not sure what virus she had and if that it is completely gone. She has a Gateway PII 350 Windows 98. Any suggestions? Thanks, BP

Check your McAfee uninstall here . http://9337387.home.icq.com/main16.html W98 boots into Safe Mode . http://www.geocities.com/~budallen/safemode.html#Windows 98 Starts in Safe Mode .

Protection errors occur when a 16 bit DOS driver tries to load in Autoexec.bat (check the file or just delete it -- Win9x doesn't need it) or one of the core files cannot load. Most often it's a misconfigured video card driver -- safe mode uses standard vga driver. In safe mode remove your video adapter and reboot. The vga driver will load on Win boot. Try to stop Plug and Play from loading a video driver and find some web help for the video card (which you did not mention.) Older Gateways use proprietary Gateway vid drivers -- not the standard ones.