I have been running Windows XP without problems for the past 6 months until I recently began encountering startup problems. Every day, the first time I startup the computer it will load Windows XP, I will see the Welcome sign, my desktop will appear and then within 10-30 secs (sometimes while there is still disk activity, sometimes after disk activity ceases) the system will hang and I will have to powerdown and reboot. Upon reboot the computer will once again hang at some point in the process, but sometimes it is while the BIOS is loading other times it is during the loading of Windows, during the check disk scan that occurs after the failed boot, during the Welcome sign or once again within 10-60 secs of the desktop appearing. Eventually, though, after as few as 5 and as many as 20 reboots, the system will boot without hanging and then function perfectly fine of the rest of the day. At this point, I can even adjust settings, install software, restart, power down and reboot without a subsequent problem. However, at the end of the day after shutting down for a prolonged period of time, when I boot the next day for the first time the system hangs and the cycle begins again. This has become very frustrating as there are no error messages, the check disk displays no errors other than occasionally needing to truncate a certain file and I have no other clues as to the problem. There are no apparent driver issues and norton anti-virus says the scan is clean. I fear that it may be a hardware problem but have no idea what is causing the problem and do not know where to begin. I am running an Athlon XP 2000+ on an ABIT KR7A board with a Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 video card and SCSI drives. Any help with this problem or in troubleshooting a software or, more importantly, a hardware issue would be much appreciated. Thank you.

do a system restore to an earlier date when the computer ran okay.system restore is in the system tools

If it is also hanging durring the POST, then doing a system restore won't do anything for you. You have a defective peice of hardware in your system, probably bad RAM.

I had this problem when my HDD was on the way out. (Well, it was new, so I took it back) It's probably a hard drive or RAM error, but hard drive seems more likely. What make HDD you got?

Maybe your computer is trying to find the IP address of a new LAN card or High speed internet connection... Try this if you have a LAN card or something close to it: -->Start/Settings/Control Panel.... Double click network connections.... right click on Local Area Connection (LAN) and select "properties" In the gerneral tab...Find the "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" option and select it. Now hit the Properties button to bring up the next "menu". Most default settings are "Obtain an IP address automatically". This is what causes the computer to hang while windows tries to find the LANs IP address. To stop windows from trying to "think"... hit the option "Use the following IP address". Now enter the "69.69.69.69" for "IP address" and 255.255.255.0 for "Subnet mask". Leave the "Default gateway" option blank as well as the DNS stuff below that. You can use any numbers you want, however, if you use "funny" numbers, you may get an error saying the numbers don't "match" or something. To avoid this, use the numbers I just gave you. Now just save the changes and shutdown the computer... see if it fixes the problem... if yes.. good... leave it... if not or it causes your internet to stop working... simply remove the numbers and recheck the box "Find an IP automatically" Good Luck, TK.