here's a strange XP problem. . .
 

anyone ever heard of the themes service causing XP to hang at the welcome screen? Testing has narrowed it down to that service, but I can't think of any reason why it would fail, or why its failure would kill the computer.

running on an AMD machine. Everything else is fine, less than a year old, RAM has been tested and is verified to be working. Any ideas?

are these things working:
safe mode loading?
are you able to recover using system restore?
Last previous working?

yup, I can boot into safe mode. No system restore points because it's a fresh install of XP - 1 week old. I reinstalled XP because it was doing this and I couldn't make it stop. after the reinstall it worked fine for a few days and then crapped out again. It's not mine, but she swears she hasn't installed anything weird, and I couldn't find anything weird that she'd installed.

I'd say it has to be something software related---possibly a conflict with a windows update. If it isn't that, it might be the hard drive going kaput. At my university's helpdesk, we see all kinds of weird problems because system files get corrupted from bad HD, but never do we see the same problem after fresh windows install.

after 1 week is really odd unless she installed something weird or a part of the hardware is defective. Can you do more testing on the parts?

Curious...here's a silly question, but is everything properly updated? Clean installs and keeping everything updated seems to resolve 99% of problems..

b'lieve I found it. over 300 SMART errors in the last 4 hours of HDD operation. Everything from CRC errors to read/write fails. I'd say it's time for a new drive.