I was fiddling with a stick of RAM this morning, seeing if I could get it to work. But after a few attempts of it loading the splash screen and then just going to a black screen and then the XP welcome screen never comes up.

So i go back to how I had my RAM set up earlier and it continues to do this. Loads the XP splash screen, but never loads the welcome screen that follows. I went into bios, figure maybe i'll do an XP repair, see what happens. Try to boot from CD, it just keeps cycling through saying it was shut down improperly. Great, so it won't boot from the CD at all. I even set first second and third all to boot from CD, and it still tries to boot from HD.

I'm pretty much totally stumped. I've never had BIOs boot priorities be completely ignored.

I had a similar problem, except i got a screen telling me there was Hard drive boot failure, i had knocked one of the wires that go to the hard drive whilst cleaning the pc with compressed air, maybe check all the leads?

Ah thats a good call! I did clean it out with some compressed air. And it actually dislodged the CD drive cable

Anyways, so I'm one step closer now that I can actually boot from CD. None of the other wires seem to be loose, and it still won't go past the XP loading splash, but atleast I can actually boot from CD. Thanks!

glad to have helped PLease let us know how it goes

EDIT: Just to clarify, was the pc working before you fiddled with the ram?

Did a hard bios reset, went back for factory defaults to no avail.
So i tried setting defaults, flashed em and now this. BIOS should be good.

Is a XP repair/reformat my only option?

Im not to sure, was the pc working before you fiddled with the ram? If so maybe the ram is now defficient (possibly due to static electricity damaging the hardware) and there is insuffiecient ram available to start up the desktop, im not an expert so im not sure if a repair/reformat will work, it depends on if what i have said above has occurred

So, memtest is clean. Anyone have any ideas? Because im stumped