Hi everyone. This is my first post.

I have a problem with Windows 2000, sp4. When it starts up, sometimes it proceeds ok and then stops at a blue screen. I do not mean a bsod, just a blank blue screen - no text, no error messages, nothing - just blue (not even a mouse pointer). This seems to be completely random. At times, I would have to stop and restart the machine 5 times before the normal blue screen with the mouse pointer and Windows logon dialog box showup. It seems to me that explorer.exe is not starting, but I am not sure. Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

I am wondering if it might be a system instability issue as I did try to overclock my system, but becasue it was unstable, I had to reset it back to the normal CPU speed. Could this have caused this problem (even thougth, now the CPU is set back to its original speed)? Would somethiong like overclocking, affect the CPU, memory or mb, to such an extant that even with my setting the CPU back to its default setting, it is causing this to occur?

Thanks for any help with this.

P.S. I also am noticing that I am now getting a lot of crakling, popping, and distorting sounds when I play an audio cd (but not if I am playing an mp3 file directly from my computer). Are these issues related?

Cheers.
Erich

System instabilities can wreak all sorts of havoc in a system. I used to play around with overclocking a lot in my gaming days. (No time for that now that I have a real job and fiance) One thing I always did after overclocking to instability was to completely reload the OS. There are a couple articles that you could google for to find out what the affects of overclocking can have on data corruption. My suggestion to you would be to reinstall the OS from scratch and see if that fixes the issue. My guess is you hosed something in the system when you overclocked.

-- Andy