I have a Dell 733 mhz PIII with 256 mgs ram that I recently upgraded from ME to XP on a new Maxtor 7200 rpm 30 gig HD, I have used about 1/3 of the drive so far. Everything was working perfectly for a couple weeks, now issues are cropping up. In MS2k2, my contrails look like white lines(I have an integrated video driver (intel 810), will upgrade soon), flat and vertical. When I boot up my system goes through the normal boot up loads some small stuff in my start.ini in msconfig until it gets to the sound driver. Then it stalls for, and I have timed it, anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes. After that it works fine. I have tried a new driver for my Soundblaster Live! Value for XP but that didn't do it. I have tried Bootvis, that only made the shut down faster. It is to the point I do not want to shut the thing off. Any ideas?

Did you upgrade or format the HD, then load XP, if you upgraded from ME to XP without formatting your HD, then thats your problem, you should format, then reload XP and should have no troubles!

WinXP overwrites the entire C:Windows file when you do an upgrade if you select the default C:Windows folder, therefore it is acceptable to do what you accomplished.However, the overwrite and installation only provide the WinXP default drivers for your controller chips and disk drive accelerator, i.e., Intel, VIA, SiS, AMD, ALi; sound; graphics adapter; modems, etc.Open Device manager, open system devices, and look for:Intel PCI to AGP ControllerVIA PCI...SiS PCI... or similiar to see what controller chips you have.Visit the MOBO manufacturer, Computer vendor, and/or the controller chips vendor site for updated drivers.Update WinXP to SP1 and Pre-SP2 from Microsoft's update website.Update to DirectX 9.0a, then test the direct X functions by pressing start, run..., type dxdiag, OK.

On a completly different not, what is "Pre-SP2" is that all the updates in between the SP's? EG:Windows XP Hotfix (SP2) Q322011

Yup!