>Hi all
>Some of you have helped out regarding my E: HD apparently being flaky.
>The system, including the E: drive, performed flawlessly when running in Safe Mode. Many times and for longish times.

>I had to move some HD cables (love those SATA connectors) in order to be ble to run Windows "Repair" (booted from CD), and while it ran to end I ended up with an unuseable system.

checked the cables ? Had one part of the isolation of a SATA cable unisolated once - caused random halts and unsystematic crashes (was the OS disk, sigh)
>
>SO I ran a complete XP SP2 install, again from CD. Again it ran to end. After booting up I was able to run installs of certain MB things and the video adapter.
>These were needed to enable the MBs network adapter and to set up my dual-screen video.

Humph - to me it sounds as if you are using too much of a brute force atack. If you REALLY need a machine, buy a new one (seriously!). I also tinker a lot on my machines (my personal down to earth expirience<g>), but I always have one spare clunker for email and tax preparation. If you want to get to the bottom of it, it is time for a health check. First in order is RAM check: let memtest86+ or a variant run for at least a night. Then HD check: including nulling the device and recreating partions slightly offset relatively to the old borders (Paragon Partition Manager boasts of having a "surface check", dunno if this is something for real or just marketing bla) and of course SMART readouts.

Then install new OS after ripping out everything not dessperately needed: just MoBo, graphic card and main disc (remember: get a new second one...) and instal other equipment after 2 days waiting period for each one.


>The result - I now have a system that simply freezes up at random but fairly quickly. It *may* be dependent on how many mouse-clicks I do. If I can get into Windows updtw with few mouse clicks it will run (check for updates) for a whie before freezing. If I click lots it frezes quickly on one of the clicks.
>The freeze is a full blown freeze. No keystrokes, no mousing, etc works in any way.
>I've run with the E: drive disconnected with no difference.

First assumption: the main partition table has problems, and your freezes them from trying to reload memory from swap.

regards

thomas