win & system .ini necessary

at first we thought a virus had attacked. Computer continuously rebooted, but apparently there was a chkdsk problem. Support from Norton advised no virus but they unchecked the system.ini and win.ini while hunting down a virus. I now get a chkdsk stage 1,2,3 each time I start the computer however, chkdsk never reports a problem. Again there was no virus.

if you add those back into the Startup process, eg, select Normal Startup?

Has the problem gone away, or is it back?

Before you try that, be sure you know how to return to where you now are. I suspect this is by booting up into the Safe Mode list of options, loading Windows into Safe Mode, and accessing the MSCONFIG System Configuration Utility again to change back to Selective Startup, and disable those System.ini and Win.ini files.

Continuous reboot can mean many things, but you may be able to halt the automatic reboot process and see if any messages are displayed when the systems stops. These are usually displayed on a blue screen, called the BSOD or Blue Screen of Death. That blue screen, (if it displays), will show useful information, and in particular a "STOP error" code and any file involved. Both of those are important details.

To prevent the system from automatically rebooting, find your My Computer icon, right click it, and select Properties. In the Properties window select Advanced > Startup and Recovery Settings button, and in the new window, remove the tick under "System failure" for "Automatically restart".

If you do that, the next time the operating system halts, it may display a blue screen and this will enable you to write down the error message. The only way to get out of that though is to turn off the computer and reboot.

Mark