I tend to agree with cupid11213. You are rapidly entering the land of diminishing returns here. It's nearly time to cut your losses. There are just too many things that could be the cause of your issues. We know it's not your PSU, mobo or RAM I think now. Or your DVD. But that leaves rather a lot still. The only thing left to check I can think of is DirectX (see below) and your hard drive. If those come up clean - re-install!
I would say it's time to back your data up. If you have partitioned your drive with one partition for data and one for windows - you should be OK - but I wouldn't risk it even then. See if you can burn a DVD and verify it using an even lower screen res? Link to another PC and copy your data over? Once you have a good, verified backup, re-install windows from scratch. You could try a repair, but you could just be wasting time. If you have partitioned your drive, get the install to reformat the C partition. If not, I recommend re-formatting the drive and creating two partitions, one for C and one for D. Don't do a 'quick format' - Because one possibility is that some part of XP is sitting currently in a bad sector. So you want all bad sectors detected and eliminated.
Which leads me to the following thoughts.
The problem looks to be screen related. So it it probably worth checking direct X before doing anything else. You should be on version 9.0c. Use Start/run and type dxdiag. You can check up on the version you have there. Look at all the tabs and see if you have any issues. With luck you do and may be able to fix them. Report back here any specifics.
You can get the latest
Direct X here.
The other faint possibility is a small part of XP is actually 'living' inside a sector on your hard drive that has gone bad. This is a rather hard area to give advice on in a forum though. So I'll just say this.
1. Personally I trust SpinRite from
- It costs but IMHO its worth every penny and I use it as a first tool when diagnosing a PC - together with memtest. If you do have a bad sector or two chances are it will be able to spare them off and recover whatever they contain so ending your troubles. But of course you may not want to buy it and it may find nothing so you won't be happy you have 'wasted' your money. But you will know exactly how healthy your hard drive is - which windows will never tell you.
2. Use chkdsk to check your drive. Open a DOS box (start/run/cmd) and type chkdsk c: /f /r /v /x
hit the enter key and allow it to run on re-boot. re-boot!
It will take a while and the output log of what it did can be found once re-booted in your event log.
Don't do a windows check disk from explorer - it doesn't do a very good job.
The trouble with chkdsk is that it doesn't try very hard to recover the data in a bad sector. So XP may only start in safe mode or not at all of anything vital is deleted by chkdsk. The good news though is a repair install usually works and your drive is at least clean.
Best of luck!
