[Mac33]

I totally agree. A clean install gives you peace of mind that everything is OK on your system and gives you a chance to set up proper protection.

[SCgone]

Stop those reboots and have it give you an error message. Maybe that will shed some light on what's failing.
Open Control Panel-System-Advanced-Startup and Recovery-Settings...Uncheck Automatically Restart.
This will at least possibly stop the reboots and give you a blue screen with the error you're having.

[Wormsworth]

I know about stopping the auto-reboot - just didn't find anything interesting that I couldn't get during the memory dump.
Because this system was never certified for XP, I feel that I will always have problems - the bios must be geared to W98 and not for ME/XP.

The question that I have that everyone has avoided was:
Is there an easy method to reformat/install without losing all my settings?

Most of my programs and data are on a separate partition than my system partition, so they are safe. But all their reg info would be lost.

Even COA would change the reg settings, but the registry is gone after a format. To save that and restore it would defeat the purpose of the reinstall.

I have done the format/install before and it always took a week or two to get the programs back - and some don't really want to install again (lots of problems with McAfee VS)
And some of the settings, I have forgotten how I set them up, or where/which .zip worked (it's not always the current one) with this b*stard of a system.

Have you ever read an article about a software patch or tweak and installed it - ran fine and forgot about it? I have. Then I lose the function for the tweak/fix. I started to keep a log of installs, but it sort of went by the wayside (I should know better working with Change Control on the big iron)

There is something called Export Settings - I have never used it, but would that save the program as well as system settings? Would it also transfer the Virus (bad) settings as well.

Thanks

Chuck

[Michaels]

To my knowledge it is not technically possible to format your hard drive without loosing your old programsand datas.
people might have missed answering this question directly as you wanted, but many had gone a great lenght to describe their personal experience with virus and solutions they applied.i know how you want to save your old configurations and i understand the labour in installing everything all over again, i wish also at the time there is another way out, but unfortunately there is none at this time.
i would suggest that you gather all informations and updates and patches and save them in your second partition so they will be a lot closer after formatting and clean installation.

[SCgone]

If you format, then you probably won't get everything back. You can use something like Norton Ghost, but then that's going to transfer the virus to another partition. You can do a repair install, but that will probably leave the virus since it would retain all your old settings. You can go into the recovery console after booting to the XP CD and there you can backup and restore the registry.
I have a special folder on another partition that I keep all the working drivers in and all the special software. If I have a particularly hard time with a software package, then I go into the registry and export the settings for that program to that special folder also.
It depends on what you export as to the virus. I would imagine you could export quite a bit and save it. But if you don't know the exact virus info in the registry, then you won't know if you're exporting it or not.
Sorry if you thought we were ignoring the question, we weren't. I missed that part I guess.

[Wormsworth]

:misery: :misery: :argh:

:coffeepot: :yellowcoffeemug: :yellowcoffeemug:
:argh: :argh:

Speechless