Failure to Complete Boot

[donsor]

I have WINxp Home Ed. My PC has been running fairly good but the last few days I started having problem booting. It reaches the pont where the logo is displayed and the progress box below it just continues to move left to right. I rebooted and once it a while it will complete but lately it no longer boots. After rebooting I get this full screen messages stating in effect that the program did not shut down correctly and gave me a choice of starting it in safe, safe with network and another mode. If I allow it to start normally after time out, it freezes up again. Any ideas what could be causing this?

[Cricket]

Is this a home built computer or a name brand one?

What are the complete system specs?

What did you do to the computer just prior to this happening?

Did you try to boot into Safe Mode?

Cricket

[donsor]

It's home built.
Asus A7N8X-E Rev2.0
2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP
1.5 G RAM
Evga Nvidia GeForce 6800XT
WinXP Home Edition
3 HDs (plenty of capacity)

Been using it for about two years now.

Recalling what I've done were:

I had problem installing Flight Deck 4 as add-on to Flight Simulator FSX
I did a couple of Registry Checks
Did windows Startup Inspector.
Ran AVG and Windows Defender a couple of times.
Tried to install the HDClone Freeware but deleted that
Installed XXClone but never got around to running it.
Did some tranferring of files from one HD to another.

It will boot completely in Safe Mode and the two other Safe Modes (with networking, etc)

You think a system resotore will help?

Also, if I clone my boot drive containing the OS to another drive (due to space constraints) do I have to disable the old drive to be able to boot with the new drive? My source will be an PATA (Eide) and my target will be a Raptor SATA.


Thanks

[Cricket]

If it's booting easily into Safe Mode then you probably don't have a hardware issue but a software related one.

While in Safe Mode did you take a look at Event Viewer to see if a driver or program is causing the problem? Maybe a corrupt driver or file is causing the problem.

How many background programs do you have loading up with Windows?

Cricket

[donsor]

Cricket:

Thanks for the help. I decided to do "system restore" going back a few weeks. That solved the problem. My PC is booting satisfactorily now everytime. It must've been some bad programs I loaded that WINxp did not like.