first off just want to say hello i'm new and i have been haveing a problem with my computer that i built on my own... first off let me just post what kind of machine i have

AMP XP 1600+
512 MB DDR RAM
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
Ati Radeon 9250 128 MB AGP Video Card
Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2

I have updated EVERY driver known to mankind for all my hardware and also i have DirectX 9.0c and everytime i play for example Doom 3... it will start up okay... everything runs just fine... as soon as i start playing about 5 mins or so... the game exits to the desktop... same with the Sims 2.. but i have an error message that says "The game has caused a crash and will now close" or something like that... and when i play GTAIII or Max Payne 2 i get this error message Unhandled exception: c0000005 At address: 0012fbf2 and its really starting to get fustrating... it has been doing this for about a year now... so i thought okay.. it must be the video card... so i went from a GeForce MX 400 64MB to what i have now... same problem... took out my soundcard and installed the drivers for the onboard audio AC'97 and same thing... removed my ram and bought new ones... same thing... i don't know what else it could be... i have looked up stuff online and have found out it could be because my computer is overclocked... well its not.. and it never has been... i went online to found out what the temp. and power and all that should be for my motherboard and went into my bios and all that and everything is fine... so my computer is not overheating. i don't get what else it could be!?! Please help i would really appreciate it! thanks!

try downloading a memory testing program (such as memtest86) and running it for awhile. do you know exactly what has changed before this problem started? you'll want to doublecheck your AGP port settings in the bios, too.

Yeah i just got memtest and i made a disk for it... i'm going to let it run all night tonight and see what that says... they say to let it run for 12-24 hours right? so i'll do that... also i have changed my AGP from 4X to 2X to even 1X and still would have the same problem and i would go into directX and OpelGL and change the settings on those to even the lowest they can go and still the same problem... another thing i guess i should do too is look at the motherboard and see if anything is leaking... god i hope not! i'll do that before i do the memtest... and when this first started it would restart on its own... so i was like wtf!? and i just now found out how to make winXP not restart on me and let me see the error message... i'm still learning XP lol anyways i would get something with all these messages of blah blah blah it could be this contact this and then it says something like... hold on i wrote it down lol

now there were a lot of 0's so i'm sure i'm off by one or two of them

it says something like Stop: 0x0000008E (0x0000000ID, 0x0000007b, 0xf85d4a30, 0x0000000000)

and sometimes i will get an error thats says something and then a code like that and then it will say PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGE_AREA

but i don't get that all the time... just some times

oh and i will get that 0x0000008E message esp if i have something plugged into my USB when i start the computer... everytime so i have to make sure i don't have something plugged into my USB when starting up my computer... also if i plug in a memory stick it will cause the computer to crash right away and go to that blue screen with all those darn 0's so i'm guessing on that one.. .its a no brainer my USB port is shot to hell... and it was never like that before... so i was thinking... okay it must be the USB... so i went into the bios and disabled all the USB ports that are bulit in the motherboard... and still everytime a game would crash to the desktop or i will get an error message... i don't know if this information helps you guys out more and really thank you so much guys for takeing your time to read all this and helping out this poor guy who kinda knows what he is doing but isn't a pro LOL

what other heavy apps do you run on that machine? do they run successfully?