ok 24 Hours later, uninstalled drivers, no change, reformatted drive, clean install of XP again.... Now I can boot up but it hangs in increasingly smaller intervals... eg I got about 6MB of Windows updates before it crashed, next time about 3MB now less than a MB.. Nothing else is running except the Update page and the modem.. Unyet, two days ago this same computer was running XP professional release candidate 1 perfectly ! This is driving me to drink