OK...Here's a problem that I have asked many people yet can not find a solution for. I have a Windows 98 desktop with a PII-450 and 64MB of RAM from way back in 1998. The computer worked fine, excluding the fan sometimes coming loose and causing moderate overheating problems. Now, it has refused to boot when drivers are enabled. At first, it would just freeze, no questions asked after loading a few programs in normal mode. In safe mode, it would display the "welcome to safe mode message box" and when OK is pressed, Explorer would crash, causing safe mode to restart with the message box. This continues in an infinite loop. I ran Norton SystemWorks 2001 from DOS and it discovered that I had three cross-linked files/folders: C:\scandisk.log, C:\Windows\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE4\J
(Sorry for the long message, this is a complex one.)

Edit: I just wanted to mention that I have 325 files on the root of C:. I've heard this could cause problems, but I dobut that going over the limit alone could cause all these troubles. But, just in case, I wanted to mention that.

Thanks for actually reading this. ;-P

Also, would there be any way to load the drivers to operate a cable modem without choosing the "load all drivers" option?

If I could just get on to mIRC, I would be happy for now. Also, I checked AUTOEXEC.BAT and there is no command in there to restart.

Choose selective startup in the boot menu (by pressing F8, or in the safe-mode-crash-recovery menu). Then you can go through and figure out the individual thing that causes the computer to crash.

I did.
It was the Load All Drivers option, as I mentioned in my previous message.

After reinstalling Windows twice, rebooting the modem, and reinstalling a bunch of drivers, it's fixed, but I would still really like to know what caused it and how to prevent it in the future.

I tried all the obvious steps, I'm not that computer illetarut. ;-P

Hmm...when I go through the step-by-step confirmation it let me select what individual drivers I wanted (as well as the stuff in .sys and .bat). Maybe if you select "No" for "Load all drivers"?

Also, do you have Norton Antivirus 2002? Because its network capture driver conflicts with other capture drivers. That is what caused almost this exact problem for me before.

Yes, in fact, I do have NAV 2003. I tried loading the drivers one by one, but I can't do that now since the is fixed. =)