system tray empty and windows doesn't respond.... help

[decibel08]

so when windows (98) boots up, everything seems fine aka the mouse moves, but the system tray has nothing in it and the clicking the mouse or hitting keys has absolutely no impact. i have to ctrl-alt-del or reset every single time. i have noticed that if i set the tab under system properties->performance->graphics to the far left (lowest) setting everything is fine. also the second from the left notch works, but with the other two settings it seems like windows never finishes loading. its bizarre. technically i could just use everything with the hardware graphics acceleration turned down, but i'd rather have it cranked up, so what the heck is wrong here?

system specs:
abit kg7-lite
amd 1.33ghz tbird 266mhz bus
256mb pc2100 micron
20gb ibm 60gxp
samsung 12x dvd
sb live 5.1
en7100e lcd monitor (not the source of any problem, i'm sure)
inno3d geforce2mx400 64mb

any help is appreciated

dbpolaris@hotmail.com

 

[HugoGuessit]

Decible08,

Can you boot into safe mode? (Use f5 or f8 to get in). If you can, the problem is with something Windows is trying to load. If you can't, the problem may be a core windows file or be hw. Please let us know the result.
good luck. hg

 

[decibel08]

yes, i can boot in safe mode, so it is definitely something windows is trying to load, but i can't figure out what. it seems like windows just doesn't finish loading becuase the system tray is empty when i'm not in safe mode or dont turn down the graphics acceleration. how can i further isolate the problem?