Heh, this threads still goin? Wow. Well I never solved my problem, but it did solve itself. One day it just stopped happening and now everything's back to normal. This was, however, after installing windows xp on another hdd, and then reverting to the old one to get some files off... then i noticed it worked fine again and have put it down to a slowly failing mobo or slowly failing hdd.... either way i don't mind