Thanks again for your help.

not entirely clear on which CD to create.

If I get no picture (totally blank screen) when windows loads, do I have no monitor drivers?

I don`t think that`s your problem. I think your resolution is set to high for the monitor. As someone said earlier, you can do a system recovery from an XP boot disk. Do some reading on bootdisk.com. It will tell you what you need.

I am hesitant to use a bootdisk- is there a risk of losing data?

The video is onboard - that is, there is nothing in either the AGP or PCI slots.

If I throw a PCI video card in there, will XP auto-detect it and begin to use it- windows start normally- just with no picture?

As to safe mode- hangs on the driver mup.sys inboth SM and SM/w/command console.

Any ideas?

Thanks

You won`t lose any data with a boot disk unless you delete it. You can put another video card in, but you have to disable the onboard video processer. What are the specs of your computer? Make and model number would be nice.

OK-

I threw my graphics card from another computer in it and let it boot normally.

No picture- same as before.

Restarted and I got my picture back- XP loaded the drivers.

NOW, I need to take this graphics card back out- can someone tell me exactly how to set this back to the onboard video card?

thanks

More info-

motherboard is VIA vt8235
windows XP SP2

At the BIOS screen go into the setup menu by either F1 or some key which it specifies and in the integrated peripherals or some menu of that nomenclature you should be able to toggle the onboard video on and or off and change the priority from PCI/PCI Express/AGP etc.

Thanks diametrical - I am back in business.