What USB devices do you have installed?

Only a mouse.

Uninstall the mouse and drivers and reinstall. What are the results? What make is it?

Well,

since I can't boot the computer in Normal or Safe mode, I don't know how to do that.

How do I do that?

Nuts, I forgot. See, I told you I was sick! :dead:

What is the make of your harddrive?

Western Digital. I hope you feel better soon, being sick sucks.

Have you ever run a harddrive diagnostic utility before? If not I will walk you through it. My suspicion is either the Windows OS is corrupted or the harddrive has bad sectors.

Yes, Western Digital's.

BTW, when I re-booted, I did so with a p/s2 mouse. No difference.
Thanks for your help Route44!

Did you uninstall your other mouse's drivers first?

Also, for clarity do you I understand you correctly that you did run Western Digital's diagnostic utility?

WD Utility - yes I did and I

do know how to run the complete test.

Since I can't start the computer even in Safe Mode', I did not un-install the USB mouse. I simply disconected it and used a p/s2 mouse.

Thanks foryour help Route44

I am wondering if this is a BIOS issue. Do you know how to clear a CMOS battery?

Also, please excuse my thick head but have you run the WD diagnostic utility or not? And can you access another system to slave your harddrive to?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "clear a CMOS battery", yes, I have run WD diagnostic utility, and yes I can slave the hd to another machine. What do you you have up your sleeve?

Thanks for helping me Route44!

Fixing this BSOD

I got: the BSOD & STOP: 0x0000007E ( 0x000005, 0xF779C756, 0xF7A3742C, 0xF7A37128 ) .

Situation:

1. Have an HP COMPAQ with and AMD Sempron CPU;
2. Completely restore WIndows XP Home Edition SP2 from the "Recovery Partition" on the disk-drive;
3. Skip one important step;
4. Install Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3) from a CD-R;
5. Reboot to get the BSOD.

Solution:

Instead of "step 3" as above -----------> connect to the Internet, and run the HP Update utility, that was loaded from that Recovery Partition. (Start -> All Programs -> HP -> HP Update).

One of 6 updates it offers has a description somewhat like "fix BSOD and looping restarts after applying SP3 on a system with an AMD processor".

My COMPAQ has an AMD Sempron processor, and thus the problem was triggered.

Thank you very much!!