>>>I'll be darned. It was the monitor. Before leaving for Best Buy I decided to try the girls' monitor and it started up like a champ. This is good news.
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>>>Thanks to all who gave me advice.
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>>LOL. Wow. One of those, huh? I guess it is probably funnier to me than to you though.
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>Not quite there yet after all. I went to Best Buy, bought a super duper 24 inch monitor, and hooked it up. It now boots to a Windows XP screen and goes no further, not even the password entry dialog. I have been through the Setup menu and Boot menu with no joy other than the C: drive being validated. Having reached and exceeded my tolerance for hardware issues in one day, I just turned it off for the night. As opposed to chucking it through the window. Grrrr....

I feel your pain.
My 'main' system (but far less so now that I am a salaried employee) has been sick for over a month now. I was finally sure it was the video card, so I bought a new $50. jobbie and stuck it in. No change in the symptoms.
Now I have to start removing RAM, which I find a real PITA.
If that turns out NOT to be the problem, my last guess is the CPU itself. Things work tickedy-boo in SAFE mode. So I'm *guessing* that possibly safe mode does not enable the second processor on the CPU chip. But who knows!?!?!?!?!

good luck
PS Smart move just putting it aside for now. I've been doing that for the whole month so far < s >