About two months ago I had a problem pop up with my home pc where it would hang on boot up. No matter which method I tried to use, it would always hang after or while trying to load a file named agpcpq.sys. I was working off of my laptop for awhile and was kind of afraid that I was going to have to flatten the damn box and reload XP. I have most of my stuff backed up to CD, but there were some recent pics and docs I would have lost and it's just a royal pain in the neck anyway.
So a couple of weeks ago I gave it a shot again and found success. I can't say it will work for everyone because none of the other fixes I found worked for me and none of them said to do what I did, but this appears to have worked for me. Why the problem occurred in the first place and why the following worked for me I'm not sure. If someone finds this post while searching for a solution, here's mine and good luck.
I had secured both an original XP SP2 CD and a Dell reinstallation CD, having foolishly not created my own recovery CD(since addressed). Booting to either CD would still hang at the same spot. On a whim, I unplugged the pc and removed the Radeon graphics card that I had installed years ago and tried another boot from the Dell CD. Lo and behold, it booted to safe mode. Through control panel I then completely uninstalled the Radeon card and rebooted successfully in normal mode. A little bemused, but happy, I shutdown the pc and reinstalled the video card(don't forget to unplug the pc). The pc rebooted successfully and appears to be back to normal now.
I credit my IT brilliance. The chicken, the candles, and the pentagram were merely coincidental.
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