Two weeks ago, on the advice of Dell Tech I reformated my hard drive. Over the last several days, I began getting page faults and stack dumps. My system crashed totally after I visited the Microsoft site. Dell Tech said I had gotten a virus and need to reformat my hard drive which I did.

Today I started my new Windows installation and had the same page faults and stack dumps. The Noron virus scan with updates, showed no viruses. The sfc showed I had seven or eight missing or corrupted dll files. Dell Tech tried to get me to reformat my hard drive again, saying that it is not possible to extract several single files from the OEM version of Windows98. They also said I should have debugged my system with the reformat and needed to do this. I refused (I have reformated five or six times in the last few months) but consented to a "dirty install."

Immediately after the dirty install, the monitor was screwed up. Dell Tech said there was a hardward conflict between my modem and my network card, and that I had several "ghost drivers" that needed to be removed. He told me to take my network card out of my computer completely, (that it never should have been ther in the first place,) delete all my device drivers, then reinstall them. I did all this. He also told me my Sound Blaster card was causing some of the some problems. After I got off the telephone with him, my modem did not work.

The next Dell Tech, over several hours, was able to get my modem going and promised to e-mail me the file "setupx.dll as it is not on my OEM Windows Recovery Disk and he could not find it at the Microsoft site. It also was not on his data base.

I did some memory chech on my system (using Norton)after this; very consistently there is a memory error around the area of 233361498. My system is very unstable with just the new windows installation and the dirty install on top of that.

I can tell my system is about to crash soon.

What should I do next? I am at the end of my rope.