O God what a job this turned out to be, I reseated the nvida card, even tried right an old 32meg one; went through the service settings and found nothing that looked wrong. I reinstalled XP with SP2 twice and kept ending up with problems one after the other (yep clean install after quick and full format)
It appears to me that the problem centered around this file which was missing "viaagp" I downloaded it and placed in the sys32/drivers folder and restarted, nothing but a blank black screen. I reinstalled all the mobo drivers etc twice and still it wouldn't work.
So I weren't getting anywhere fast, I had a disk of XP with SP3 on which wouldn't work last time I tried it after spending 70 gbpounds on. After going away to have a smoke and down some much needed coffee, I came back and it seemed to have worked..well so far so good.
Seems to be stable enough at least everything will hold it's settings ... so he says with everythiong thats phyiscally crossed ..crossed and some you aren't meant to cross too.. so with a high voice I' will press on and thanks people really appreciated the support
