It's me again with this XP lunacy. Here's the history of the problem.

For some long days and even longer nights I've been trying to put together:

MOTHERBOARD
MB ABIT® IC7-G i875/ICH5-R chipset, Socket 478, 800MHz BUS, ATX format, Intel® P4, audio, Gigbit LAN on board

CPU
Intel P4 - 2.4 GHz

RAM
DDRAM 512MB PC400 APACER® CL2.5

HD
MAXTOR® DiaMaxPLUS® 160GB 8MB CACHE SERIAL ATA

GC
VGA ManLi GeForce FX 5200 128MB TV OUT 8xAGP LITE

BOX
Midi MS® 350W

XP and MAXTOR drivers installation all goes OK, but when I'm trying to start it up the machine freezes (quite early on XP start-up gif thing). First I thought it was because of MAXTOR (larger than 137GB), so I replaced it with my old WD ATI only to get the same result. I tried Win2000 and it worked just fine (barring HD which now pretended to be of 33 GB). I used MAXTOR bootable CD to setup the HD (OK) and reinstalled XP. Of course it got frozen again (very same point). I tried Safe Mode and it worked! And HD seemed to be OK this time. Now what can be wrong with Normal Mode?

Have you checked out the RAM by any chance? This is just a shot in the dark.

Yes indeed. I tried 2 different ones (and their combination). I can see it's a driver thing (90&).