Everyone is of course familiar with the infamous Blue Screen Of Death. However, my Win XP Home has recently been bewitched by a whole new kind of blue screen - a welcome-blue screen. Welcome-blue is the tone of color you see in the screen where you click the user names to log in. Now, every now and then when I leave my computer alone and use the Switch User -function to lock my computer by getting it to the welcome screen, it has "crashed" when I return. By "crashing" I mean that the whole screen is blue, only the cursor is visible but it has become an hourglass. Everything is working under the blue veil though, modem lights are flashing and I can even tell that it returns a SETI@home packet every 3,75 hours or something, as usual. Some times my PC has been able to awake from the coma in ten minutes or something but usually not. I've kept it open for over 48 hours just to see that it's still "dead". At first I thought it could be something screen saver related, but no. My screen saver is set to go to welcome screen when it's removed and sometimes there has just been the blue screen waiting underneath it. Disabling the screen saver doesn't help, the welcome screen just keeps crashing... Keyboard doesn't respond so a cold boot is the only thing that works.

My system specs:
  • Windows XP Home, up to date
  • AMD XP 1700+ (1,47 GHz)
  • ASUS A7V-333-X motherboard
  • 512 MB RAM
  • Connect 3D ATI Radeon 9000 64 MB (Omega drivers, but the crash occurred with Catalysts, too)
  • 80 GB Seagate, 200 GB Maxtor
  • Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Digital
  • Hercules Smart TV Stereo
  • Microsoft Internet Keyboard
  • Logitech MX700 cordless mouse