Win 98SE Boot Problem

[ACM]

I am experiencing a boot problem with Windows 98SE. It runs through the “starting Windows 98” screen fine, but then as it’s about to load my desktop, start menu & icons, the screen just stays blank. Worse, yet, this only happens occasionally. Sometimes this happens & then I reboot and it works fine. I’ve run all the system checking utilities that are provided with Norton Utilities 2002, as well as a clean reinstall, but this still continues to happen. The system is running a dual boot, with Win XP Pro. Any suggestions?

[GaryRouth]

After your clean reinstall, did everything look OK in Device Manager? Just to see, try booting into Win98's Safe Mode and taking a look around in Device Manager to see if anything is flagged. You could also try rebooting to the Win98 boot menu & selecting the logged boot option - and seeing if anything shows up in there. Somewhere here on the forum should be a link to a bootlog analyser (since I'm short on time tonight, I don't have it handy).

My first guess is a recurring unhappy driver. Updating the offender (if that's what turns out to be the trouble) might fix things up.

If this only happens in Win98 and never in WinXP = seems unlikely to be a power supply, or heat, or system memory at fault.

Best of luck
. . . Gary