>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>Thanks to all who gave me advice.
>>>
>>>LOL. Wow. One of those, huh? I guess it is probably funnier to me than to you though.
>>
>>
>>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 >

I HATE hardware. Other than the Mac, of course ;-)