I did see the memory/space issue on the MS site about the first problem - but that is all gone now, I think (I am pretty sure) what happened was that Mozilla was purging the mail file and was creating a temp file - that ate up space, and when XP crashed the temp was till there. Once I deleted the tmp file XP booted - however the missing tabs are now the big issue.

Somehting has to have happened and is happening - safe mode the tabs are threre, normal mode - nothing. I have tried the little reg tweaks about hiding those tabs in hopes that by some magic it would reverse the process - no luck. I am searching high and low for any sort of help - most of the info I can find all starts with "Right click on the desktop..." but that is of no help.

I will try drive cleaner and see if that helps any.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/driver_installation_hints.html

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_winxp_archive.html

File for future reference. Windows keeps a "secret" copy of the all important Registry for situations like this. The problem is when you start messing around on your own its probably too late to access it manually.

Here's the deal. When Windows shuts down normally it sets a key flag called the Current Control Set Registry key. This tells the system to boot using the normal Registry copy assuming the logic that it worked OK last time, so it should be a good working copy.

When Windows locks up, you have a power outage or any kind of hang this flag doesn't get set, Windows sees it wasn't set, and that normallyforces it to try to boot from its "secret" copy of the Registy which is a just a second copy of the last version used where the shut down flag was set indicating all was well at shut down.

When Windows starts throwing weird messages S T O P and ask for help at that point and don't do anything. Otherwise you end up in the situation you find yourself in now.

All may not be lost. You can try to force Windows to use its "secret" copy of the Registry. Assuming it hasn't already taken the corrupted version and made a "secret" copy of that, if it has, then you're in a hopless loop.

To check...

Reboot, keep hitting the F8 key. When the menu pops up you should see a choice that says boot from Last Known Good Configuration. Try that. If it doesn't help, then boot into safe mode, step through the device drivers loading one at a time skipping everything you don't need to see if you can get past the snag. At best a crap shoot but worth a try. It sounds like Windows is trying to load a bad driver which explains the 100% CPU useage. The task is to find which device driver, then once you know, install a clean copy.

Still no good, dig out your Windows CD, boot into Safe Mode being sure to choose Recovery Console. Its a little geeky and operates from the command line. Using it you may be able to repair or replace the defective driver if that's was is causing the hang.

Before you totally give up. Just before you throw in the towel reinstall Windows OVER your present install. This simple trick has saved my bacon several times. It won't hurt anything to try.

A couple other things you can try:

Go into safe mode enbable Boot logging. Reboot. Windows will create a detailed log of what it does step by step as it loads. If there is a serious hang the last file is likely the culprint. The file should be called Ntbtlog.txt. Look at it in any text editor. It should give a pass fail report for every driver it tries to load along with all the inernal Windows stuff. It can be a long list running many pages. Again, it can give you a clue.

Not really that surprising that sometimes when Windows hangs bad, its the video drivers that are hanging. Rule them out by booting in VGA mode and Windows will use its own default viideo drivers. If you get past the hang don't forget to change back to your regular drivers.

Good advice from all. Thanks.

Where I am at now - the Driver Cleaner utility is pretty spiffy. But it didn't do too much I hadn't already done as far as the nVIDIA drivers went.

But here is some interesting info - I decide to boot into safe mode again to be sure it wasn't the nVIDIA drivers...it wasn't. Safe mode worked fine - I mean the tabs were all there with the nVIDIA drivers installed - obviously in safe mode it wasn't using them, it was using the basic VGA.sys driver. Ok - so I go back to the normal mode. No tabs and no control again. So I decide to run the system check and the DX Diag...get this. I am told that there is a problem with DX and it is not the latest version. A lot of files are flagged as being version 8. I have no clue how that happened because the install version was still flagged as 9b and other files were indeed 9b. So I re-install DX 9b. Keeping my fingers crossed I reboot - nope, not it. But now in normal mode I do notice that it is reading as the VGA.sys driver and NOT the nVIDIA driver. Hmmmm....

So once again I uninstall the drivers and re-install the drivers. Now when I run the DXdiag the screen goes black for a moment and pops back up in full 640x480 x 256 glory....and it says it is now using the correct driver. Ohh goody. Back out to the settings - and still nothing. Still only the theme tab and nothing else. Now I am stuck at 640x480 x 256 colors with the only option being windows offering to "automaticly" set a better resolution and color depth. No thanks to that.

Grrrr. But wait!!! I log off and go onto another screen and what pops up - the nVIDIA setting tray. Yes! So I can at leats now adjust things via that interface. But there is no interaction at all with the windows display settings like there used to be. Safe mode - yes, normal mode - no. With or without the nVIDIA drivers installed the result is the same.

So I am back up, sort of. All I have really installed over the last month is the demo of Vegas 5 and I doubt it installed, or caused a roll back, to DX 8. Well in anycase - thanks. :)

Have you reinstalled your video card drivers?

>>> Have you reinstalled your video card drivers?<<<

over and over and over again. And yes I uninstalled in almost every way - using uninstall, by hand, with the utility Craftech suggested and by just intsalling over them. That isn't the problem I have found - it is someting else and it has to do with the windows Xp 'Display properties'

Well - I shut down my PC and go out. Come back and turn it back on. XP loads up and I get the little icon in the corner for new hardware. it says "Your new hardware has been installed. Please reboot..." and so on. Confused I open the hardware list and see the Video card with a yellow ! next to it. I open up the DXdiag and sure enough it says that the VGA.SYS drive is running and I should install the correct drivers. I reboot and check again - same thing. I look under the drivers for the video card and they are the correct ones. So somehting is telling XP it can only load the VGA drivers.

Where and what is telling windows it can auto load VGA drivers and run only those??? Any clues.

That is typical. Install drivers and reboot to allow Windows to set up drivers.

After booting with "F8" key held down at the DOS cursor
startup, go to Control Panel, then System,
then Hardware, then Device Manager, then Display adapters
and see if TWO are listed. If the Nvidia and a VGA compatible display adapter are listed delete the VGA compatible display adapter and reboot.

John

john -

Only one was listed. The nVIDIA. In any case I did a repair install of XP. After waiting the whole evening I am back up. Knock wood all seems to be ok, all the display tabs are back and the card was there...although it did do the silent hardware install..but this time it did put the correct drivers in. I just installed the newest drivers because it auto installed older ones.

SO here is keeping my fingers crossed for the reboot.

Filmy,
You might wanna give System Mechanic a shot, from Iolo. It's a great tool, has a 30 day demo. Try the Pro version out, it will likely kill that VGA.dll if it's not necessary. It does a lot more than registry maintenance, but it's a great little tool.

Well I went ahead and did a repair rebuild of XP Pro and all seemed to go smooth. However -

I opened Vegas loaded up a file and played around with it to make sure all was still ok. No issues. So I close up Vegas, don't save anything as I was just playing. Go on about my business. Maybe 15 minutes goes by and suddenly I get this pop up - "Windows - Delayed Write Failed" and it lists the file I had opened in Vegas. Tells me I should save it to another drive. I sort of ignored it and maybe 10 minutes after that I get another pop up saying the file could not be saved and it was lost. So this freaked me out - I went to the folder and looked and the file was there and it was fine. Plus, as I said, all I did was open it in Vegas and play around with it. I did not save it or make any changes.

I went on about doing things and cleaning up and hit the empty trash - it went on about it's business and than suddenlly a pop up - "Windows - Device timeout" and listed that the "operation on \Device\Hardisk3\DR3 was not completed" and that made me nervous...disk failure? not sure...so I rebooted.

All was fine - but than for no reason I got the "Delayed Write Failed" but this time is just said the drive. So I start doing a search for that error and read the possible solutions on the MS support site. Bios set too fast for UDMA was one option. Disk cache was on or the cable could be wrong. Well It wasn't the cable because it worked fine before the crash, plus if you use the wrong cable the card returns a warning about it during boot. There is no setting for the disk cache because it is on a Promise Raid/SCSCI card and a UDMA bios setting does not exist - on-card bios. So that 'help' was no help. So I do a search for the 'Time Out' error. Not that much info on the entire message - but when I do just a search for "\Device\Hardisk3\DR3" a lot of things come back. Seems to be an issue several people have had - but no real solutions plus a lot of pages in other languages that I don't read.

So for the heck of it I click on "disable synchrous transfers". And I reboot.

Well - for whatever it is worth that seemed to do it. I have not had any issue since with those 2 errors. The other drive on the same card has it enabled and there have been no issues. HOWEVER - here comes the "What the hell happened???" part - the crash affected my C drive in relation to XP. However these errors came about via what used to be my firewire drive, now my "K" drive. I start looking closely at the files on the drive and I start to see subtle changes....for example a "/" has replaced a letter on one After Effect project file. In one folder there is some file called "┼O5A4.tmp" and I can not do anything with it. I try to delete it and it says it can not read form the source file or disk. Another folder is renamed with a bunch of characters and I can't rename it - but I can copy all the files from inside the folder and move them to another folder. Now the worst part - a folder called "audio" has been renamed "AUDId" and i can not open it or rename it. And it contains all my audio files for a feature. Not good.

So I start backing up files that I can and I start doing a search for what could cause this - in relation to the errors I was getting. Not too much that seemed to directly relate, but things like bad hard drives and such came up.

So here is what it wasn't, and things I did - in case anyone has this problem maybe it will help, or maybe someone has another idea(s).

1> It is not the controller card. Another drive is hooked up to it as well and not one problem. I also unseated the card and puy it back in. So it wasn't that either. Unplugged cabled and put them back in.

2> Ran defrag...did not matter. Ran scandisk - reported no errors. Disk reported as being "healthy".

3> Downloaded various demos of repair/restore programs. The one that actually read *all* the files was one called active@ UNDELETE. Some of the others read the folders correctly but would only see one or two of the files inside. So as far as the audio folder goes I managed to get all the files off to another drive, bit you still can't access the folder "AUDId" I also finally saw how much info is left over on a hard drive - even stuff I had "shredded" was there. Spooky kids. (update - tried a few other programs because I neede to access another folder and get files that were *not* deleted from it. Only program I could find to do this was R-Studio. Another program - FinalRecovery - will read the files but because they weren't deleted it will not do anything with them...which makes sense *if* one could access the files. This program however has a 'clean' function that will further erase the already deleted files.)

4> I tried a program call HDD Regen which will read bad sectors and try to repair them. It found nothing wrong with the disk.

5> I went back through all of the settings from Black Vipers site.

6> I reinstalled service packs for XP just in case - I was not sure if the repair reverted back to older files or not.

7> Did a pest search with Pest Patrol. Did a virus scan. Both turned up nothing.

So I have been running error free for almost 30 hours now but the K drive still has 2 folders that can not be read, renamed or deleted. And one file still is there. I am going to get a new hard drive and just copy all files over to it and than reformat this drive. I will use it as a back up drive I guess and put the new one in it's place.

The only other stange message I got was when I booted last and I got a pop up about the virus checker having "No communication channel". Like the "Delayed write failed" and "Device timeout" I have never seen or gotten the error before.

*sigh*

The "temp" files with the %$#)(%*#*% name were probably made by whatever program you were using when you saw the delayed write error and it, not you is the owner so Windows won't let you mess with it. To get rid of such a file you'll need to write down the names exactly how they are including any spaces and the full file extension. Then go to start/all programs/accessories/command prompt.

Use the CD (change directory) switch to go to wherever the file is on your system.

then type: erase myfile.xxx where myfile.xxx is the %$#)(%#*%

There is a single space between the command 'erase' and whatever the file name is. If that don't work you'll need to do it from safe mode and skip loading any drivers. Windows will just erase the file and not say if or not it done anything unless you make a syntax error.

Then just type dir to see if indeed the file is gone.

Next to remove the empty folder type: rd a space followed by the folder name.