Some Wonky Shiznit; aka, Troubleshooting XP

So a little while ago, I lost my network connection. That's OK - I'm used to that. This machine has a habit of that, mostly due to the fact that I rarely reboot and I run a lot of network intensive apps (which Windows tries to prevent).

Well, upon noticing that nsvcIp was still taking about 400 megs of memory, I was like "screw it, let's reboot" - I mean, it did install a Windows Update yesterday anyway.

But, oops. It wouldn't reboot. Oh, it would get past POST and even to the Windows progress bar, then no further.

"Stupid update" I thought

But... why does my KVM screen not show up on my machine... It shows up where there is no computer physically connected... And it shows up on Dino's machine... And hers shows up looking at this machine... Well, that is really really odd.

I try Last Known Good, no change.

I try Safe Mode, but that hasn't worked in years... I can't remember the last machine that successfully got into safe mode. Probably back when I had IDE drives, no doubt.

I try googling for the problem, googling for the last driver before Safe Mode failed, everything... According to all the blog entries, it is probably a bad motherboard, bad cpu, bad memory, bad driver, bad this or that...

What the hell do I do?

I'm going to see if there is any other options on the F8 menu that might help. Doubtful, but worth a shot.

On rebooting, however, I accidentally missed my cue to start hammering F8. Just a tad too late. Screw it, I'll keep doing it anyways, just in case.... What's this? Now it boots!

So the good news is that the computer is booted again. The bad news is I have no idea why it had failed or how I fixed it - or even whether it will act up again next time.