Appologies to anyone who happens into this thread expecting something interesting. IN another thread, the poster known as inertia claimed that he could help me fix a problem with my PC that has so far defied my experts. In order to give inertia a chance to prove his/her point (and in the off chance that I my get a solution to a serious problem) I have created this thread.
Here’s the problem statement, in a nutshell:
System: Dell Latitude CPi 366MHz Pentium II
OS: Windows NT 4.00.1381
Symptoms:
System hangs during boot up. The windows are starting to draw, the task bar gets about halfway there, then everything freezes. A hardware restart is required. This occurs 100% of the time when there is no network present, however the system will boot properly about 80% of the time when the network is present. Probably unrelated, but I typically get one application crash per day, all applications seem to be subject (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Deneba Canvas, Winamp, Acrobat, Exceed, and even the Windows Explorer). When Explorer crashes it takes the whole system down with it. Most of the other applications simply crash with no other ill effects, though occasionally a crash will put the computer into a really slow mode where I really have to restart to use the system effectively. The disk has been reformatted a couple of times. The OS has been reloaded from scratch several times.
Feel free to ask for any other details that might be helpful in your diagnosis.