The problem is this: my work PC sometimes doesn't boot properly. What happens is that it'll boot up happily, but at the point where it should switch to the XP-theme for the logon prompt, it doesn't -- it just says "Windows is starting up" and takes a long time (minutes) to get to the login prompt.

When you do log in, it takes just as long to get to the desktop, and nothing works properly. Event Viewer will start up, but doesn't display any events. There're no network connections in the relevant part of Control Panel.

After several (five or so) cycles of shutdown-and-restart, it will start up perfectly happy, as if nothing has happened.

Now, this has never happened on any of my other machines, but also happens occasionally on other PCs here at work.

My PC specs:

Dell Precision 470 Workstation, with 2Gb RAM, dual Xeon 3.0GHz HT CPUs, 2x80Gb SATA disks (JBOD). ATI FireGL graphics.

It seemed to start happening during installation after I joined the domain (AD-based, I think we're still in W2K compatibility mode), and would happen almost every time I rebooted.

It hasn't happened for a month or so, but just started happening this morning. As I type this (on my laptop), it's still happening.

Ideas?