Glad to hear it. Congratulations.

--
Peace,

Jeffrey W. Bowen
Remove NO SPAM entries from email address to send personal email.

Please post replies of successes or failures so we all can benefit from each
others' experiences.

"Big E" wrote in message
...
Paul, Jeffery and all...
Finally fixed it. Been a wicked couple days with this old beast. Power
supply checks out fine - it had gotten new caps when I did the motherboard
regulator for the CPU. about a year and a half ago - all still good.
Voltages
w/i spec, available current aplenty.

After trying everything in the posts, I attempted a repair install with a
slipstreamed SP3 disc. On the restart, just as it would get to the black
Windows bootup screen, there would be a flash of BSOD and then reboot over
and over. Tried it again with the original disk with SP1. Same thing. Did
a
fresh complete install from the SP3 disk and voila, I have more
operational
USB ports than you can shake a stick at, both the onboard SiS and the NEC
card. The PCI bus is back. Something way down in the grizzled innards of
XP
was amiss. Wish I could have found it so I didn't have to reload all the
software. On the upside, I've got a spanking clean registry with no junk
in
it.

Thanks for all your help.