Help: Intermittent hangups on boot.

[MrMungus]

OK, I've had this computer forever and this has happened in the past and I think my fix has always been to reinstall the OS.

I have this problem that just came up again where sometimes when I boot, the computer boots fine but I can't do anything. Specifically, I can't click on anything on the desktop, the keyboard doesn't do anything (including the Windows key), holding the mouse over the taskbar gives me an hourglass, and when I Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot, the computer says that Explorer is not responding. If I kill that process I can reboot.

I've tried removing every card and disconnecting all hard drives except the boot drive and this still occurs.

The weird part is that the problem is intermittent. Sometimes when I boot, I can operate the computer normally and sometimes it's "frozen". The only other factor that might be relevant is that the problems started after I reinstalled TMGEnc DVD Author (which I doubt is at fault but who knows).

Thinking about just reinstalling Windows 2000 (since I've been installing and uninstalling some programs lately and might have screwed it up).

Any ideas?

TIA

[redwudz]

One thing you can try is trading out your memory modules temporarily. Memory going bad can cause all kinds of weird problems. Problem is there are a couple of hundred things that could cause this. Try safe mode if you haven't to isolate driver problems. All I can think of for now.

[pharlap]

and another fine fault is dust
especially fine dust that has built up underneath the cpu fan
unplug the sucker and take it out to a good light source and see if you can see a fine dust layer around components near cpu and ram this will cause all sort of errors and glitches especially on ecs and asus motherboards

[Shudder]

How many ethernet cards do you have on there.. and are they ever not connected to a line?

Usually when a computer does what you're talking about it's looking to a dhcp server to assign an IP address. The OS is pretty much worthless at that point and you just have to wait a minute or two for it to timeout, then you can do your start menu, etc afterwards.

[MrMungus]

How many ethernet cards do you have on there.. and are they ever not connected to a line?

Usually when a computer does what you're talking about it's looking to a dhcp server to assign an IP address. The OS is pretty much worthless at that point and you just have to wait a minute or two for it to timeout, then you can do your start menu, etc afterwards.

Just one...and I also cleaned out my CPU and cleaned off the memory...didn't help.

I think it was a software/drivers issue (I've been installing and uinstalling hardware and software lately to test various video capture cards). I ended-up wiping the hard drive and reinstalling W2K and things are now going swimmingly (even with all hardware reinstalled).

Thanks!