Hi, My mother phoned the other night to report a problem with her PC at home. It's kinda old, it's a desktop and it's got a P4 3.2Ghz, 512MB RAM and XP Pro SP2. It has a Belkin WiFi card which I put in about two years ago and it's been working fine. The problem is this: now, whenever she boots the computer up, it gets to either the XP Welcome screen or as far as the desktop before it just hangs solid and won't move. The mouse won't respond to anything either. The distance it gets varies each time but it always gets at least as far as the XP Welcome screen. I talked her through to getting it started in Safe Mode (without networking) and it runs fine without freezing at all. Because she said it was freezing whenever the Belkin wireless manager comes up when the machine is running in normal mode, I managed to talk her through uninstalling the Belkin bloatware (while in safe mode) because I thought that was crashing it. She rebooted into normal mode again and it's still freezing. This problem has started really suddenly and I'm not 100% sure what it is, TBH. The fact that it runs fine in safe mode could mean that the drivers have gone funny, but this machine has been great up until right now and I can't think of any reasons why it's gone screwball out of nowhere. My bet is on bad drivers or possibly a bad WiFi card itself, but do you guys have any other ideas? Other than the lockups, the machine seems sound and it runs great in safe mode as I say. I'm 50 miles away and physically can't go home for the next fortnight to have a look at it myself. TIA for any new ideas, ukdeveloper.

I think you're fixating too much on the wireless driver. If it's coming up in safe mode, use MSConfig to narrow down to the process that's causing the crash.