Brandish

Here's the issue... Win98se

Recently, the PC boots up to the Windows splash screen, and then either says "Windows protection error. You need to reboot your PC," or it just goes straight to the shut down screen. Computer will boot in safe mode, so I've played with a million different settings in the autoexec.bat files, config.sys file, win.ini file, etc etc. Nothing seems to have an effect.

Here's the strange part: I took the computer home to diagnose it, and connected to my monitor, it boots up fine. Thinking this odd, I took it back to it's place of residence, and sure enough with that monitor connected, I get the protection error. If I disconnect the VGA connector on the monitor and start the machine up, it boots into Windows no problem. ***??? Any ideas? I was thinking hardware conflict with the video card, or maybe even the video card drivers, but I'd appreciate any pointers. Thanks!

scottydont2841

has it got the up to date and correct divers for the monitor its being -played on?

oshwyn5

Excellent job of diagnostic troubleshooting.
When I first saw you post that it worked at another location I was going to say there was RF noise on your power line (the wall outlet) translating through and making things unstable. But then you mentioned that disconnecting the monitor at home lets it boot successfully. Does just not powering on the monitor allow it to boot or unplugging it from the wall or does it only boot when the monitor is not connected to the computer?
My first guess would be a short or grounding problem in the monitor allowing RF feedback through the power supply .

Have you tried booting to safe mode, changing resolution to 256 color 800x600 and refresh rate of 75Hz and then try booting to windows? It is remotely possible that the current settings are unstable for that particular monitor (and not the other one) and thus cause a feedback oscillation .

Normally, a windows protection error ( a type of general protection fault) means that something tried to write to a memory address in use by windows and that when windows told it to stop it kept trying ; so things were killed to prevent damage to windows.
This tends to be a driver issue (or memory or power supply )so I would also suggest that you go to device manager and locate all entries under monitor and remove them.
Reboot and let the monitor be detected and its plug and play drivers loaded. (Note that you should do this anyway since you connected to another monitor and it may be using the settings for that one not for your current one).

Brandish

Thanks for the replies!

I doubt it... Although whatever drivers are on there now worked fine up until a little while ago, so it's very strange. I think I will try updating both the monitor and video card drivers and see what happens. The whole problem with this is it's for a business - a doctor's office to be exact, so they rely on this system for their patient database, inventory and receipt printing. All this dependence on a machine running Windows 98se... I think it's ludicrous myself, but apparently their office program has had issues running with XP, and the software creator doesn't seem too interested in making it compatible. That, and the owner doesn't want to drop $300 on XP Pro anyways... Argh.

As it stands now, the monitor has to actually be unplugged to get past the splash screen. Shutting it off doesn't seem to make a difference. I will try those things you suggested though... But this is crazy... It took me almost a full day to finally figure out that the issue was with the monitor. Only in Windows 98...