I just picked up a T43 with a bad hard drive and now I've got that fixed up. Next curiosity are the startup splash screens, they are all black with white text on them. The first one says "Phoenix First BIOS(tm) notebook proversion 2.0 and then it goes on to test the cpu, system ram, extended ram, system bios, video bios and says mouse initialized". The 2nd screen says "Broadband Netextreme ethernet boot agent" and the 3rd one is a one liner that is checking the hard drive active protection sensor. The next screen is the normal windows startup screen that shows the thermometer bar loading. Can anyone explain this?

What BIOS version is installed?

Try pressing F1 to enter BIOS, F9 to set up defaults, then F10 to save and exit.

Let's see whether that brings any changes.

akj, he he he, who knew? Success, HOW did you know that?

thanks burns

Well:
The first screen is there because "boot diagnostics" is set to "extended".
2nd screen is because in boot order, the network card is put before internal hard drive, so the computer tries to boot from network.