Got a problem. I have a brand new installation of XP pro on the computer that I just built with Acorp 6A815EPD1 motherboard. Celeron 400Mhz cpu with 512 MB RAM. XP Pro (no Service Pack). When I start the computer the first time, computer locks on the XP “welcome” screen. The blue bars do not appear. The welcome screen image appears little dimmer than usual. I have to turn the power off and then when I start the computer up, every thing seems to work just fine. I can recreate the problem every time the computer is off for more than few minutes. What is interesting is that once the computer is up and running on XP and then I do a shutdown with restart option, there is no problem with the restart! The problem seems to occur only when the computer is powered off completely for few minutes. The hard drive I have installed is a brand new Maxtor 60GB. Once inside XP, there are no problems whatsoever. I have tried installing XP Pro again but I still get the same problem. I have also NT 4.0 SP 6a installed on this machine and it works just fine. The event logs don’t seem to indicate anything obvious. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Not sure if this will help and I’m not sure if this is even correct, but a device driver is probably the problem. When you first power on the machine and XP tries to load that particular driver it freezes, however on the 2nd warm boot XP sees no need to load that driver (or thinks the driver is already loaded) and boots up just fine. I was going to say check the event logs but you did that. Double check all device drivers and do OS updates. Does XP boot into safe mode from a cold boot? Just a shot in the dark but those are the things I would check first. Hope that helps. Scott

Scott, Thanks for the response. No, XP does not boot into safe mode from cold boot. I will double check the logs again. The only other device (apart from harddrive and lite-on burners) that is on the motherbaord is an Elite Group Video AGP Card Si305 Model. You think Video card may have anything to do with this problem ?

I had a similar problem with a maxtor drive when I added it as a secondary, windows would freeze at the welcome screen, and would do this from cold boots only. I reinstalled too, didn't help, I finally did a defrag, and that seemed to do it. That probably won't help you, but you never know.

Guys: I have more information. I was wrong. I checked the event logs again and found bunch of errors under "System" (Event Viewer). They all are pointing to the same source file W32time (a dll file ?). Here are the errors: Time Provider NtpClient: An error occurred during DNS lookup of the manually configured peer 'time.windows.com,0x1'. NtpClient will try the DNS lookup again in 15 minutes. The error was: A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host. (0x80072751) - Event ID 17 The time provider NtpClient is configured to acquire time from one or more time sources, however none of the sources are currently accessible. No attempt to contact a source will be made for 14 minutes. NtpClient has no source of accurate time. - Event ID 29 The errors repear 4 times each. Any ideas ? Thanks.