Don't look at -> http://www.google.com/search?&q=bad+capacitors
Also, you may have the new Nachi or other WORM which is not stopped by any known Anti-Virus. Be sure to do online virus scans which seem to uncover this issue.
Another piece of nonsense is the continued crashing of machines that run the Messenger Service. This service is enabled by default and is a point of exploit. Dire details at http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-6132-0.html?forumID=32&threadID=5429&start=0
In closing, I shudder when I read "Logitech keyboard driver/program" since I found such software to be less than trustworthy.
You have a lot of items to look over, including removing the LINT that's builtup on the CPU heatsink.
Bob
Ok... I'll try to keep this brief, but in order to get a good idea of what happened, I think I'll have to go through it all. Here goes...
I have had Win2k installed on the same machine for a while now (a couple years). Periodically I reformat and reinstall the OS to keep things sort of "clean."
The last time I reformatted and reinstalled was about two months ago.
A few days ago, I was playing a game (Ultima Online - I have played this for years without serious problems) and received an AOL Instant Message. I'm not sure if it happened precisely when I received the message, but within seconds, my computer froze. Keyboard, mouse, everything was frozen. My only recourse was to hit the reset button on the comp, so I did. Upon restart, everything froze again at the Win2000 startup screen (white screen, scrolling color bar, progress meter with blue bars). Every time I tried to restart, I had the same problem.
So, I booted to safe mode to see what would happen... got into safe mode ok. Figured this was a weird windows problem so I formatted the hard drive (from Safe mode with Partition Magic v. 6). (This might have been premature, but since I have reformatted and reinstalled so many times, I am quite comfortable doing this).
After formatting, I restarted the comp with my Win2000 cd in the drive to reinstall windows. After loading a whole bunch of drivers (raid, scsi, etc), the windows setup froze with "starting windows" at the bottom. Tried it again several times with the same result.
So, I gave up for a while. A few hours later, I came back and tried reinstalling again... success! After getting Win2000 on, I began reinstalling drivers... got to my Logitech keyboard driver/program, but when I restarted after that, the system froze at the same point it did originally (at white windows start up with the blue progress bars). That was last night.
Just started up the computer and everything started up just fine. However, I now don't trust it... I'm almost positive this will happen again (although I don't really have a reason why).
So my problem is completely beyond me. I suspect a hardware problem, but I"m really not sure where to start. But then again, could it be my keyboard driver? Could this be a heat issue? or does this sound like something else? Win2000?
On other important thing to note: both USB ports on my motherboard have crapped out on me (happened about a month ago).
Any ideas/comments are welcome.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for your help.
-Paul
PS. I have also posted this in the hardware forum

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