XP Crashing on startup - Microsoft reps. please help

[glankit]

I have Googled endlessly, no luck.
XP SP1, DirectX 9.0c.
P4 2.8 800mhz, 1 gig of ram (Dell Machine)
NO HARDWARE CHANGES

Items in task bar: Zone Alarm, Spy Doctor and Speaker (thats it, nothing
else)
In msconfig, I have only 6 things checked.

Whats happening is is that out of 10 restarts, 8 of them will crash. Desktop
comes up, items on the desktop, I have full mouse movement but after
clicking something, the item "highlights" then the system hangs up, still
have mouse movement but its locked up. CTRL-ALT-DELETE wont even bring up
the Task Manager when this happens, I'm then forced to manually power the
system down. I may have to do this 3-4 times before I'm successfull (as in
now as I type )

The system is virus free, I use Spydoctor and Symntec religiously, last scan
last night showed no viruses of any kind.
I even went to msconfig and unchecked the roughly 6 items there, rebooted
and its still hanging up.

I know people from MS help around some forums, I hope I've found the right
one.
Thank you!

 

[Malke]

I have Googled endlessly, no luck.
XP SP1, DirectX 9.0c.
P4 2.8 800mhz, 1 gig of ram (Dell Machine)
NO HARDWARE CHANGES

Items in task bar: Zone Alarm, Spy Doctor and Speaker (thats it,
nothing else)
In msconfig, I have only 6 things checked.

Whats happening is is that out of 10 restarts, 8 of them will crash.
Desktop comes up, items on the desktop, I have full mouse movement but
after clicking something, the item "highlights" then the system hangs
up, still have mouse movement but its locked up. CTRL-ALT-DELETE wont
even bring up the Task Manager when this happens, I'm then forced to
manually power the system down. I may have to do this 3-4 times before
I'm successfull (as in now as I type )

The system is virus free, I use Spydoctor and Symntec religiously,
last scan last night showed no viruses of any kind.
I even went to msconfig and unchecked the roughly 6 items there,
rebooted and its still hanging up.

No "Microsoft reps" here. While some MS employees occasionally post
here, these are public newsgroups hosted on MS servers. The majority of
people who help are volunteers who do not work for the company.

It sounds to me like hardware problems, not software (Windows). Random
failures are usually connected with hardware, not software. Here are
general hardware troubleshooting steps:

http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Hardware_Tshoot

Testing hardware failures often involves swapping out suspected parts
with known-good parts. If you can't do the testing yourself and/or are
uncomfortable opening your computer, take the machine to a professional
computer repair shop (not your local equivalent of BigStoreUSA).

Malke