Computer continuously rebooting

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here is a brief history of the problem:

My wife called me yesterday and informed me that the computer would not boot up. I asked her to leave it off until I got home. When I got home, I turned it on and it booted up to the screen that gives you the option of going into normal boot, safe mode, etc. Any choice that I made caused it to start to boot all over again and return to the same screen, even if I chose “safe mode”. I was able to get in the bios, but even choosing failsafe boot parameters had no effect. I decided that windows may be corrupt and inserted my winXP installation CD and booted to it. It began the installation process, but stopped with a blue screen of death and gave me the message “SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”. My computer is about one and a half years old and has given us no problems until now. I have made no hardware or software changes recently and it worked fine on Sunday. My wife told me that she just turned it on and it started doing what it is doing now. Does this sound like a hardware problem? A corrupt windows installation? Maybe even a worm? Does anyone have an idea about what I should try next? I am at work now, but I can try something when I get home.





Here are the specs of my system:

ABIT NF7-S Nforce2 mobo

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ “Barton” w/retail cooling system

Saphire Radeon 9800Pro 128MB

Western Digital 100GB ATA/100 Hard drive 8MB buffer

Kingston 512MB PC3200 RAM *2

Lite-on 8x8 DVDRW

Windows XP home edition

 

does indeed sound like a virus, alternatively, the "virus protection" isnt activated in bios is it? as this isnt actually an antivirus but only stops software writing to the boot sector of the hard drive. if its enabled in bios , turn it off and try re installing. just a sugestion, but im sure someone can help further ...

 

could also be a faulting hard drive, if you can try a new one .. do so then you can set the old one up as a slave and do a full scan on it and try to recover any data from it