At the logon stage the system usually hangs again, at different moments: Before the blue logon screen appears but after the mouse arrow, some time when the logon screen animates or when placing the mouse cursor over the logon button. Rebooting again will, you guessed it, let me further on in powering up my system.

Some times the system hangs for a final time when loading starter apps. Rebooting yet again fixes this.

None of this happens when the PC has been in use for a while, and I'm restarting/rebooting the system. The system is otherways stable.

This problem occured just recently, I had been using it for several months with only one problem: The boot was very slow. I fixed it with a hard disk cleanup, defragment, a Norton Win Doctor cleanup and running BootVis. Some time after this process the problems occured.

I'm using a Pentium 4 2.4Mhz on a MSI 845PE Max2, with a WD Caviar 120GB 8MB cache and 1GB RAM. ATI Radeon 7200 64MB.

You may have a problem with your memory...take out all the modules and use only one at a time, place one module in the first slot on the memory bus and power up the system, let the system check the memeory and then let it boot normally. Use the system like you normally do, when you are happy power down the system and remove that healthy memory module and place another one in its place. Do the same, ubtil you find the faulting module.

If the modules all respond ok to your tests place all the modules into the system like it was at first, and go to www.memtest86.com and download the memory testing utility.You will have to create the utility with a small batch file supplied, its straight forward...

Use nero burning rom to burn the image to a Cd-r. (Go to file>Burn Image>and select the file to burn from the location you set it up in.)
Once you've burned the cd boot from it and use the tester to test the memory. The tester will test the 2 L1 & L2 cache memeories and the main primary memory. It takes a while to do the job.

If the memory is all ok, set default settings in the BIOS and check the processor is seated properly and also all cards within the PCI bus slots are seated correctly and firmly.

If the problem persists remove all cards from the computer except the video/AGP card and try the system then

Jase