Okay, here's the story.

On Wednesday, I had problems with my PC locking up, mainly the USB standard microsft optical mouse going dormant, and the only way I could bring it back was with a reboot.

After reboot, the machine was on for approx. 10 minutes, the mouse froze up again, and there was a bittorrent error - the machine itself didn't freeze, as I could use the arrrows on the keyboard to move the webpage I had active, but I had to restart to get the mouse to work. The mouse wnet dormant about 1 second before the bittorrent error popped up.

So, I restarted the machine, and obviously disabled bittorrent immediately - I also updated my anti-virus and did a quick scan of the machine - no problems were reported.

Well, after about 10 minutes, the machine locked up again, and it was late, so I figured I'd just work on it later.

Now it is Friday, and when starting the machine, it only goes as far as the first opening screen that usually just flashes momentarily, that just has the Intel logo on it (motherboard).

I built the machine about a year ago, it has a Pentium 4 2.67 processor and 2GB of RAM - I actually reformatted and started over about 2 weeks ago, and have been extremely careful about what I have added, so I am fairly confident I don't have a virus.

I took the tower apart and made sure all of the connections are tight, but I still can't get in.

I'm running a valid, legal copy of XP Pro.

Any suggestions on how I can get in the computer, and more importantly, keep it on?

I was actually in the process of downloading the driver for the mouse the last time I was booted off.

THANKS!

See if you can boot the XP CD into the Recovery Console and try the command: FIXBOOT