Gray Screen On ME while upgrading video card

[grafvonein]

I got a new radeon 9600xt vid card and tried installing in on my Dell Dimension 8100 running ME. I first uninstalled the NVIDIA Geforce 2 MX drivers from add/remove programs, shut down the computer, and popped the new card into the AGP. When I booted up I got a "NIC Failure" popping up between system check and the ME splash page. I also got that after the splash page. Then normal mode would just give me a gray screen. with nothing on it.

I shut off computer, turned it back on, and got same NIC Failure and a gray screen, except I now had a scan disk pop up. It was locked up till I ended task on "msqsvr32" which wasn't responding. After the scan disk ran with no errors, I just got the gray screen again. I shut it down, put in old NVIDIA card and got the exact same problem. I went into safe mode, tried uninstalling onboard NIC and video drivers and none of this seems to fix it. So now i'm stuck with this gray screen in normal mode (which also comes up in background of safemode, but at least safemode is functional).

Can anyone give me an idea of how to fix this and get the new card working at the same time? Some friends of mine have put forth the idea of reformatting and upgrading to xp, I just need some input or solutions on this. Thanks

 

[Rage187]

It could possibly be fixed since it sounds like its having a IRQ conflict w/ your NIC. But for god's sake, reformat and upgrade to xp. ME is complete junk and probably 90% of your problems.