Yesterday I went to power up my pc and it keeps shutting itself off during boot right at the windows splash screen. I am able boot into dos but that's it. I have installed no new hardware/software.
I am thinking this may be related to another problem I had a while back. Then it would stall during boot with an error message to the affect of missing or corrupter himem.sys. I fixed that based on the procedure in MS knowledge base.

Well, this time I tried to run scandisk from dos and got a similar message regarding himem.sys missing and to make sure a particular line appears in config.sys.
went into edit config.sys to view himem.sys. It shows a couple hundred lines of some suspect strange looking characters. Being a rooking I dont know what this could mean, is it a virus...

Anyway, at this point my thought is a clean re-install of windows, but before I go through this headache of a process I thought I would ask for suggestions first.

Win 98se
Celleron 1000
Tyan Trinity 400
640 mb ram

Config.sys is a text file, and if you are seeing garbled characters then that may be your problem. Try this:

Boot to DOS prompt.
Rename your config.sys file to config.old (or something similar).
EDIT a new config.sys and put the following line in:
device=c:\windows\himem.sys
Save the file.
Make sure the himem.sys file exists in your c:\windows directory.
Reboot and see if that helps.

OK. Attempted ren config.sys config.old
result= file not found???

OK, a few more details.
I tried to boot with step by step confirmation.
I get the following errors:

The following file is missing or corrupted: C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE
There is an error in your config.sys file on line 2
BUFFERSHIGH=20,0

The following file is missing or corrupted: C:\WINDOWS\CWDINIT.EXE
There is an error in your config.sys file on line 8
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\DBLBUFF.SYS

Then a couple lines down it gets to
c:\windows\wininit.exe

c:\
A line of random characters

And this is the point at which the pc shuts down.

I believe wininit.exe is associated with a virus, I'll have to do some more research.

In the meantime, any more suggestions would be great.

OK. Not sure of the how or why, but after some reading in the good old MS knowledge base I extracted wininit.exe from my win98 cd since wininit.exe was missing from my windows directory for some reason.
So it boots into windows now which is great, but I am still very bothered because I don't know why this happened...and because it took me about 8 hours (on and off) to get the dumb thing going again.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to why this stuff happened?
By stuff I mean the missing emm386.exe, missing himem.sys, missing wininit.exe.


For now

Glad it's working now. Missing/corrupted files could be from various reasons - virus is one. I did a Google on wininit.exe and found links that describe it as the Bymer Trojan. Here is a link on Symantec's site:

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/ven...llw.bymer.html

Think you might have hit the nail on the head there discgolfer, this could have been caused by a virus and it obviously looks like it has.