USER.EXE BSODs - 98 nighmare

[buksida]

A friend of mine has an old box (pIII 667, 64SD) with 98 SE on it.

He's been having the same blue screen of death whenever using windows explorer or trying to execute any file or program. Most of the error messages say something about general page faults in USER.EXE module blah blah blah.

Here's what I tried:

Remove HDD and scan in clean machine - 8 trojans found and removed.
Re-install Windows 98 SE (over the top, not a format)
Update the latest patches and software from the MS Security CD (2004)
Remove all unnecessary programs and NAV 2002
Clean all temp files and general crap.
Scan and remove all spyware.

None of which solved the BSODs. Next question, is a format necessary or does it look like a hardware failure?

[Sly]

Might be that the cpu is over heating, or a stick of bad memory,

Clean fan and Re-seat heat sink and try from there.

[confus-ed]

..None of which solved the BSODs. Next question, is a format necessary or does it look like a hardware failure?

For a rough rule of thumb - Is it repeatable in safe mode ? - some stuff mayn't be possible to do, while in safe mode - but what might normally cause one, if possible ? - if it will still bsod, then its most likely a physical problem, if not its s/w.