....."it stops with a black screen & blinking cursor". Next time it does that hit "Ctrl+Alt+Del" and see if that jars it lose. XP sometimes hangs when looking for the boot record in the CD drive. If that fixed it and your system starts up, you may want to change the boot priority to the HD being first (CD is set to first by default). Do that in your start up BIOS settings. The other thing is that "win.com not found" message you got. I know you checked for virus and spyware but something that has become very common (and anti-virus/spyware doesn't detect) is browser redirectors or hijackers. Those little suckers will get into your registry and want to be the first in line to start. If they start at boot-up (which many do)they will hang your system like it's doing. To detect this DL "HyjackThis". It is a free but very professional registry/browser redirector detector (do a google...many places to DL it). Only takes a few seconds to do a scan and find out what's going on. If you see any references to "win.com" (which I'm pretty sure is not a Windows component) or anything else that doesn't look normal you can delete it. If your not sure what the log file is showing you, just post it here and I can take a quick look at it. Good luck,SWAMP