Carolina1

My experience is that this is really a problem created by MS inability to restart a hard drive. Go to Control Panel - Power Options - Power Schemes and under Turn off Hard Disks, change the setting to "Never". That should solve the problem. Depending on how you use it you may just want to extend the time (instead of Never) if you know you are not leaving it for extended periods, because it will save on the life of your disk.

Answer to: Andromeda43 No, I could not try the system restore. I stated in the original message that the repair facility obviously deleted all my restore points. The only restore point that could be found was the one made at installation (after the repair), which of coarse was exactly what I was using and isn't any good when XP won't even boot. I hadn't expected this delete to happen since it never did under the 98/95 system backup utility. So, I had not looked at an external utility, but I obviously will take a look at one now. It's not a total loss because I frequently back up my data to external drives and the data wasn't lost anyway. It's just wasted time and with no explanation, I can only expect it to repeat.

Avast for anti-virus and I did run a spyware check as well. I ran a complete scan when I finally did get it to boot and it came up clean except for a few files that it could not scan, but I knew what they were. I also turned off my firewall and used turned on the Windows firewall as soon as I received the message the first time.

The computer would not boot my XP drive (only one) this morning. No known changes were made prior to shut down. I could access the drive through live Linux disks and Free-Dos, so the drive seems okay. I finally ran the repair facility and used chkdsk to verify the drive was again okay. I then went to the install function and selected repair instead of a full reinstall. The machine has restarted with XP. I verified the properties and the bios setup to make certain that everything was normal. Present problem - Outlook can't open the default email folders. I can't get into www.microsoft.com (using IE6.0)or use the update manager with the message "The requested lookup key was not found in any active activation context". I'm using Firefox at this time to get onto the MS site. All the restore files were deleted during the repair, so I'll not even waste my time using that option in the future. I also ran a virus scan (auto-updated yesterday) and found no issues. This is an upgrade from 98 ( 3months ago) with all the online updates using update manager, with the exception of IE7 because of all the negative press it recieved. 1G of Ram & 1.3 AMD and plenty of hard drive space. I use my computer for work and not play, so there is no junk software on my system. 3 Questions 1) Is there any way at this point to avoid a full re-installation of XP and all my other software? I already lost a work day going through the first round. 2) Is there any common explanation for this sudden boot issue, even when the disk is clean by even MS analysis? 3) Is there a true full backup program for XP, that will not require re-installation of XP first to re-access the program. Thanks in advance,