Hi biggiesmallz,
Not one person in 20 has the patience I have, and which is required, when troubleshooting hardware, so I seldom check back after I give a suggestion that is a shot in the dark like this. They usually won't try my suggestion no matter how easy it is, and if it is complicated they usually dump the whole project and do something like buy a different mobo or format the HD. I don't mean to dump on anyone, so don't take anything personal. It is just that I really direct comments to lurkers anymore. 90% of what has turned out useful for me, I got inadvertently while lurking
>I uninstalled ALL the TV tuner's drivers and applications and it still will not boot to Windows.
I'm not sure if you are saying you did this in addition to what I said, or you think that is what I meant.
>Other people have been having problems with the VIA chipset and the Happauge PVR.
Well, it could be a problem with some VIA chipsets. There are some confirmed, or at least some people claim there are. OTOH there are probably 99 out of 100 people with VIA based motherboards with this tuner card working without a hitch. I realize it is no consolation to those who never get it working. Anyway, that's the way it normally goes with this sort of thing. Some people would rather not carry the search to the bitter end before throwing in the towel, so putting it on the chipset gets them to the conclusion they would rather reach early. It is their time and their money, so they are entitled to proceed anyway they want.
OK. I looked at those links. I didn't read every word, but I notice that they have irregular flakiness, and that Windows does boot OK. That means your problem is not the same, at least not yet. XP defaults to automatically rebooting when it encounters an unrecoverable error, something deep in the bowels of the OS. Now, hanging is not the same as rebooting, but in case it may be rebooting, you can change that. It is a lot easier than pulling a card out every time you want to try something.
Start
Control Panel
System
Advanced tab
Startup and Recovery section
-- Settings Button
System failure section
untick Automatically restart
You might also change "Write debugging information" to (none). That's how useful it is to anybody but MS product support.
I can't count how many times I have had a problem that made Windows stall at booting. I don't think there was any similarity to whatever turned out to be the fix, when I found one. In none of my personal experience was it the chipset.
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I notice you don't have a clean install. It is not at all unusual for something that does not work to work after a clean install. You can put a second version of XP on the same HD, so you don't have to wipe the HD.
You first have to make room on the HD for another partition. A five-minute download, free trial, shareware program that will do that and a load of other things is BootItNG. It is also amazingly cheap for everything it can do. I use it from a CD, but you can install it as boot manager on the HD. It doesn't need, and doesn't use, Windows or any OS to do what it does. It is it's own OS, in effect. The author calls it a boot manager, but it can shrink your main Windows partition and let you make, say, a 3Gig partition for a second version of XP. Thereafter, you direct the XP install CD to add another version of XP on that new partition when it asks you. Every time you boot, you will get a menu which allows you to select which OS you want to boot.
Something like this is almost a necessity when you screw around with hardware obcessively as I do. It used to work just fine. Then I slipstreamed a CD with SP2 and it wouldn't let me into Windows until AFTER I authorized. I don't care to do that just to troubleshoot. The original CD gave you 30 days leeway. I guess there were too many people MS could screw out another $100-200 by not letting them mooch for 30 days. A few days ago, Automatic Update put a malicious trojan on my computer (I mean besides the one they call the registry) that they call Windows Genuine Advantage. When it was installing, it announced what it was, and I clicked Cancel, and it said it was cancelling. The next time I rebooted, it installed before Windows signed me on. True, it hasn't caused a problem ... yet. I notice in the Add/Remove Programs applet that this trojan CANNOT BE UNINSTALLED. I seems they can do anything they want once you have Windows on your computer. The time has come to dump this POS they call XP. It is not all that difficult to operate a near functional equivalent from linux or BSD.
Let me describe a hardware failure that seemed odd to me, just to see how odd odd can be, just as a baffling example. I'm not saying your problem is anything like this. One day one of my computers wouldn't post. Substituting showed the video card (Matrox) was the culprit, although the video card had been working fine in that computer for years. Just to confirm, I tried the card in other computers. It caused non-posting in two computers, but worked perfectly in a third. In fact, in that third mobo, I ran a game demo torture test for several days and could not produce any problem. I later gave that computer away and the video card has been working in it without a hitch for over a year (as I expected.) Before I gave it away, I tried that video card in five other mobos, because I really liked that card, but it would not work. Now, I could have attibuted the failure to the chipset - the only mobo it worked in was the only one with a SIS chipset - but something must have failed on the video card. Still, what possibly could have failed if it works perfectly in one mobo?
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