With a little more time to set aside (actually, I just wiped everything I was planning to do on the computer off my schedule), I decided to give Windows XP SP2 another try.
After a long, hard struggle in tracking things down and disabling a ton of crap - including pretty much every device on the system to the point that my mouse was inoperable - the system still wouldn’t boot past the blue screen.
I uninstalled Nero, which was recommended somewhere I read due to possible incompatibilities in the CD-writer device drivers. I uninstalled some other programs while I was in there including the K-Lite codec pack. (Maybe I’ll be able to build movies for the ZVue longer than 15 minutes now, eh?) Still no dice.
I finally got the boot logging to work and actually found the file (in C:\Windows\ for some reason instead of the root), and sifted through that a bit. Somewhere near the bottom, I noticed some questionmarks in a loaded driver filename. This filename looked familiar, and it turns out that it had appeared on the blue screen. The full path of the file led me to start examining my pre-existing firewall.
Agnitum Output was the problem. Version 2.1, which is current, does not work well under the DEP that my processor supports. As it turns out, you have to set some values to make things possibly work until they release version 2.5. Instead of waiting or working around the issue, I uninstalled Outpost (which is a shame, because it’s my favorite firewall).
Computer boots.
I re-enabled all of my other devices and everything still seems to run. Of course, now I have no firewall but the one that comes with SP2. Great.
Since I’m familiar with Trend Micro from what I use at work (I find Norton too intrusive), I downloaded a copy of that and am in the middle of its install as I write this. Hopefully the computer will boot after this firewall is installed, because I’ve allocated more time than I wanted to this problem already by about 5 hours, and I’d really rather spend my long weekend writing code and using the computer than troubleshooting SP2.
Still, I have a SATA device driver that’s not working right. It’s disabled right now, but I expect that I may eventually use it.
