Hey there Nightbreaker,
It took me a minute to realize what white bar you were referring to. Here's
the deal. That's probably not Windows doing that, but another program. I'll
explain in a sec. If it was Windows, it'd be a familar strip of bars (like
this: | | | | |) that fill up to a solid white bar, with the text that says
"Press F8 now for advanced startup or troubleshooting options". That's a
white bar that gives you a progress meter for time to press F8. In Windows
2000, you saw that every boot. In XP, you only see it if you're resuming
from hibernate, or the previous start up failed. Windows gives you about...
oh, 2 full seconds to press that key (unless it's from hibernate, then you
get however long it takes to reload the hibernate file back into RAM).
A white bar that fill from left to right very quickly without any
place-holding piples (those ||||| things) isn't Windows. This bar, that
fills very fast, under half a second, is your very fast opportunity to invoke
(typically) a recovery process or boot to another partition. Try pressing
Spacebar or F10 when you see it, very quickly (before it goes away)... I bet
you'll find out what it's for. Typically you'll never need it, and someday
if you can't boot your computer, your tech support will tell you to "press
this key when you see a white bar" and you'll think "ah ha".
_________________________
Shawn
