Nearly every time I boot my WinXP machine, I get a black screen following the WinXP logo loading page. At this point my PC is still on but I've got a black screen. After booting into Safe Mode and looking at the event viewer I see that I always get 2 errors which occur at the same time which appear to correlate to the boot problem (I don't get other errors). With this info on hand I don't know how to fix the boot problem however. Here is what I see: Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine CoCreateInstance. hr = 0x80040206. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. and The COM+ Event System detected a bad return code during its internal processing. HRESULT was 8007043C from line 44 of d:\nt_qxp\com\com1x\src\events\tier1\eventsystemobj.cpp. Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services to report this error. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. For the VSCS error Microsoft says: In MMC, in the Services snap-in, verify that the COM+ services are enabled. If they are not, set EventSystem (COM+ Event System) and SENS (System Event Notification) to auto-start instead of to disabled. I don't know what this means. What is MMC? The COM+ error seems to have no fix according to Microsoft. Please help if you can. Thanx.

VSCS might be solved if you turn off volume shadow copy on that volume. MMC is the way MS now uses to interact with windows. Use start--run--mmc and a popup will show up that is the base of mmc. From there you can add in any of the snap-ins.

sorry to sound stupid, but does the volume refer to the drive or partition? Should I disable VSCS by running services.msc and setting it to Stopped? Won't this prevent System Restore from working? Also, what about COM+? Should I set it to Stopped also?

Can't say what is causing the shadow copy problem. Sure you don't want to wreck your system restore. Can't say if or not that is causing it. See help and support for shadow copy service. Com can most likely be stopped. It can always be started later if needed.