Windows flashing monitor, non responding keyboard, and other woes

[excalibur3]

I am using an old pentium 4 dell with 512mb of ram with windows xp pro installed on it. I recently did a clean install of windows and it has been working very well but about 2 hours ago the monitor started flashing on and off like it wasn't connected and then about 30 minutes later it started doing that in conjunction with the keyboard sporatically stopping to work and then when it did the cursor would move but no letters would show up. Now when it is restarted it is all graphically messed up and I can't do anything on it. I started in safemode and tried doing a system restore and nothing happened. Then i tried a disk cleanup and a norton system scan and it is still screwed up. I can get in safemode and it seems to work fine but I'd like to get out of it if possible.
Thanks,
Stephen

PS- I don't have a windows cd with me currently so it would be nice to have a way that wouldn't require that.

 

[excalibur3]

So what steps do you guys think i should take?

 

[excalibur3]

Are there any programs around that fix corrupted windows files? I've been away from windows for about 2 years because I had a mac and with os x if it got screwed up I could just reinstall os x over it and it wouldn't mess up any existing programs or files, it would just fix the os. Is there something similar I can do here or anything that wouldn't require formatting the drive? I have a xp cd now so I can get in recovery mode.

 

[scottws]

A repair installation would be similar to what you are talking about. I feel like this isn't a Windows problem, but maybe it's worth a shot.

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_...g%20Over%20top%20of%20Existing%20Setup:

Click on How to Run a Repair Install

 

[excalibur3]

Yeah you're right it didn't work. It said a file that it wanted to overwrite was in use and that persisted even when I exited out of everything in windows. What do you think it is then if it isn't windows?

 

[scottws]

Hardware.

 

[excalibur3]

So why would booting in safemode fix the problem?

PS- When I try to update windows from the windows cd I get an error that dtsci.sys is in use. Is there a way I can exit that program so that I can continue with this update?

 

[excalibur3]

So it turned out that it was not a hardware problem but actually some file in the windows os getting screwed up. I was able to fix it by uninstalling SP2 but for future reference is there anything I can do that would have gone through and checked to make sure that none of the windows files was corrupt (not scan disk, something specifically for windows functionality)?

 

[excalibur3]

So actually looking into it more it appears that when the correct drivers are installed for the videocard it gets messed up. Are there generic ones I can use that are compatible but might not have this same effect?