XP keeps crashing badly. can anyone help?

[Dropkick]

guys, i have reinstalled XP like 3 times in the last 5 days. this is making me insane. here's all the problems i noted, maybe someone can make sense of it.

not sure how it went down before, but today the thing freezes, and like the patient guy i am =), i wait for it. then a blue screen pops up with error message:

"problem caused by file nv4. nv4 beginning dump of physical memory. dumping physical memory to disk"
then, the computer reboots.

it gets stuck in quasi-DOS with the error message "windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \windows\system32\config\system.
insert XP disk into cd drive and restart. hit R to repair"

well, repair dont work, so i end up reinstalling windows everytime this happens. could the file "nv4" be norton antivirus? cause it seems to happen after its installed, but im really not sure.

lastly, i have always noticed that when devices are displayed on boot-up, there are a few with the same IRQ number. not sure if that is relevant but i though they were all supposed to have unique numbers.

thanks in advance for any help.

 

[daveybrat]

sorry to tell you, but that file is the driver for your nvidia video card. And that error is the "infinite loop" error you're getting. It's very tricky to fix, but
you can find lots of information on it by searching for 'infinite loop' on these forums or www.viahardware.com forums. If you install win98 or winME you will
not have this problem.
good luck!

 

[DAPUNISHER]

daveybrat is right on the money on the NV4 issue and some never do resolve it As to the error message on boot-up I get that when overclocking to high, are you overclocking? Have you tried the latest detonator drivers for your vid card? Have you installed SP1 for XP? What chipset are you using Via, SiS, ALI, nForce? As to the IRQ question it's answered in the FAQs section of AT here Read them all as it's a very good place to start for many issues/questions.

 

[acidvoodoo]

when i first installed xp, i was getting BSODs and system recovered etc messages. when i ran out of ideas, i went into the m/b and put on the most stable defaults, then installed it, and quickly got all updates for windows, then changed the bios to faster options again, seemed to work fine

 

[Dropkick]

thanks for all the help so far.
i just downloaded and installed Nvidia's latest driver. i never installed one before the problems. any chance just the newest drivers will keep it from craching again?
ps, i have an AMD 1.7, SiS mobo (im 90% sure thats what the box said), 256mb DDR, SB live 5.1 and a geforce 2 GTS with tv-out.
oh yea, and i havent overclocked it, i had enough trouble putting this thing together to begin with =). lemme know any more suggestions or if i just have to wait and pray that the new drivers fixed the problem. i think im gonna make a drive image to save some time reinstalling everything.