T41 stuck in WinXP boot loop only at certain locations

[rkawakami]

Looking at a friend's T41 (for the second time in as many weeks). The system has been reported as running fine up until a few weeks ago when she got a Comcast broadband connection. She took it to some repair shop and they fooled around with it and told her to access the BIOS each time she started the system and all would be okay (???). The problem was that it began getting stuck in an infinite Windows XP boot loop. It would start, pass POST, begin loading Windows and then either bluescreen or simply re-boot itself. During those subsequent boots, Windows would complain that it was not shut down properly and present the usual menu of things to do (start normally, use last known good configuration, safe mode, etc. etc.). She also mentioned something that I didn't take too seriously at the time but I now may have to change my mind.

When I looked at it about a week ago, it started up fine (after selecting a normal boot), passed memory diagnostics but seemed to take forever to load up. I attributed that to the number of startup processes and disk slowness and fragmentation. I trimmed back some of the programs with msconfig and swapped out the 30GB 4200RPM drive for a 40GB 5400RPM defragged one. It still took some time to completely load (and I blame Norton AV and her installation of AOL 9.1 for that) but it was working again. Tonight, she called up and said that the problem was back. She noted that it was working fine at her business but as soon as she tried powering it up at home, it would get stuck in that boot loop again. We tried a bunch of stuff over the phone but we didn't have any luck with it. I just got the system a few minutes ago and since it's late I can't work on it until the morning. But I was able to boot the system at my house and it worked fine .

My guess is that the T41's wireless system is getting hung up at boot time because of the access point at her house. I run an 802.11b access point with 40 bit WEP. The card in the T41 is an Intel 2100 3B. I guess my questions to her would be, "what type of wireless system are you running at work and home?". Does it seem strange that she can boot the T41 at her work, at my house, but not at her house?

During our earlier phone conversation, I asked her to disable the wireless system in BIOS but she didn't see that in her T41 (I was using one of mine to guide her through the process). I asked what the BIOS and Embedded Controller versions were. They are 2.11 and 2.04; way out of date. I'm planning to do an incremental update on them so at least it's current but besides checking on her home's wireless system and seeing if I can get anything out of the system boot logs in the morning, I'm out of ideas.