Seriously need help

Okies running XP Pro o/s
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe M/B; AMD Athlon 3200 Processor
9600 Saphire Graphics Card/1G Kingmax Ram in 2 x 512 sticks. Did have 1 x 120G and 1 x 200G but as of yesterday now have 2 x 200 g H/D's
Problems started 5 weeks ago with continual checkdisk on start up. Did full
format of both drives but problem kept occuring. Came to the conclusion that the 120G drive had faults so I replaced yesterday with new 200G. Also replaced the IDE cable. All went well yesterday with new installs,, lots of restore points etc, however this morning on start up, it just hung on a black screen. M/B said 'now booting from opertaing system' etc: but it didnt. Four restart later and I finally got a 'windows didnt close down proplerly etc message. Also ie has crashed twice. This was happening all the time before, but I dont know what else to try. Any advice is most welcome.
PS: I have all these new sqmdata files I have never seen before.

 

Those 'sqmdata files' are related to windows live messenger.
Did you install things from your old drive to the new drive from a backup?,thus introducing the same trouble to the new drive?

Lamehand

 

SQMDATA files get created by a bad version of MSN Messenger. To fix this I noticed that I had installed INSTALL_MESSENGER_NOUS.EXE on my PC but this version causes those annoying files to show up at the root of C:.
The solution to the problem: uninstall MSN Messenger Live (via Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel), download INSTALL_MESSENGER.EXE from the Live site and install it. This fixes the problem and leaves all your previous settings intact (so you don't have to reconfigure them). It also shows up as the same version 8.0.0812.00 but there are obviously differences between the two versions. Hope this helps someone else out there...