Windows XP Professional locks up while booting

[Hired Hitman]

Whenever I start my Windows XP Professional sometimes it locks up when the loading bar is.. well... loading, then i hold the button on the tower to shut down, when i restart it has a screen which asks me if I want to "run windows normally" "Run with last known settings" and a few others, anyway I click "Run with last known settings" and sometimes it works fine, others it continues to lock up at the loading bar or the "welcome screen", do you have any idea what is wrong and how I can fix it?

I'm thinking I may have to Format, but I'd rather not waste my time backing up files when I could just remove the problem with a minutes.

[Hired Hitman]

Well I just formatted :-\

[Vega]

Did you download any drivers recently? That may have ****ed it up.

[Hired Hitman]

no driver downloads for a month or so.

[CREDO]

you could have done a repair install, that would have saved the format.

[Hired Hitman]

Well.. the lock up is back :|

These are the things i downloaded

Gundbound (Game)
Nvidia Video Card Driver (driver) <----- Probably the reason... how do i fix it... :-\
KaZaA lite (P2P Program)
Mozilla (Internet Explorer)
I installed the Flash Plugin

I think that's it so far.

[JJ Moore]

any newly installed Hardware, is the gfx card new? any new ram?

[CREDO]

was the driver from nvidia, or bloody microsoft windows update?

[Hired Hitman]

from nvidia... [/late reply]