I am not sure what the full problem is, but tI think I had the same problem. My pc would boot into windows fine everything in systray would load then my cd-rom would spin and PC would lock. If I let the PC sit for 5-10 min it would boot fine. But then I would run a game and it would lock. I am running win 98 and had just sound card, video and 1 nic. I had a problem with IRQ sharing. I reinstalled win98se without ACPI by typing in setup /p i. Works great now. I know reinstalling sucks, but sometimes (rarley) it is the best answer.