WinXP slow boot or blue screen

[mjbanks]

I did some searching on the forums for about 30 minutes and couldn't find anything that was similar to my situation, so I'm posting here...

I went away for the holidays and had the computer shut down. When I got home and try to boot, it either takes forever after bios for Windows to load with the XP logo (anywhere from 45 seconds to 45 minutes) or it gives me a blue screen with MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION. I searched around MS site and here and can't find anything. Is there something maybe trying to load that is causing this? How can I check what it trying to load? When it does blue screen and I reboot, after bios it takes sometimes 5 minutes for the safe mode/last known good/normal option screen to come up. This is getting very very annoying.

Don't know if there's a registry problem or some corrupt files or what. I ran adaware and spybot and they found nothing. No viruses according to AVG.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

 

[bcastner]

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=329284&sd=RMVP

This is a hardware issue: an unrecoverable hardware error has occurred. The parameters have different meanings depending on what type of CPU you have but, while diagnostic, rarely lead to a clear solution. Most commonly it results from overheating, from failed hardware (RAM, CPU, hardware bus, power supply, etc.), or from pushing hardware beyond its capabilities (e.g., overclocking a CPU).

 

[mjbanks]

I updated the bios (MSI K7N2 Delta ISLR motherboard) and it now goes right to the screen where i can select, then hangs after any selection there. I'm thinking there is both hardware and software issues here. Here's a breakdown of my hardware:

MSI K7N2 Delta ISLR motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2500+
2x 512mb Kingston DDR33 ram
all running at default timings

I ram memtest86 and found no errors with the ram.

Any other ideas?