Phil Harrison

I have a 'mature' installation of XP Home on my PC. 9 times out of 10 it boots happily, loading all my background programs and allowing me to carry on. From time to time, however, it crashes in mid boot while loading my ADSL Modem driver, and the task manager isn't there, so I have to do a hard reboot. The hard reboot is ALWAYS successful, and the crash, when it occurs is ALWAYS first boot of a new day!

Presumably, one of the backgrounds (probably McAffee) is interfering with the driver load..... that far I can get!! But what I can't figure, is why the problem is only occasional - at first sight you'd expect the machine to boot along the same sequence of loads every time, and hence always fail, or always succeed. Any explanation anyone? Any "quick fix"?? Does change of date change anything in registry??

Cheers

Phil