Windows ME Black-Screen @ exactly 2 minutes?

This is another very strange one. I put a Dell optiplex GX150 to work at a church, using WinME and a bunch of stuff, and for 2 years or more it has been rock solid. Its on a highspeed internet link [dsl] and kept up to date and squeaky clean, well-protected. over the thanksgiving break, something happened, and when the lady came back to use the system on saturday after T-giving, it would boot up, go into windows, then blackscreen or reboot, or try to reboot.

I thought it would be an EZ fix and tried everything I could to get it to stay up just long enough to do the usual stuff... it crashes at pretty much the same timespace, every single time. Bring it up, get win ME up and paint the desktop, and about 90 seconds or so after everbody gets loaded and ready to work - Bang. Gone. Simply seizes up... no kbd, no display, black screen with nothing, like instand hibernation 'cept without keys. Try in Safe Mode and same thing except that it will reboot instead of Black-seizure about 50/50 if started in safe mode.

It seems that trying to hurryup and run the control panel to use hastens the crash a little bit, but that may be my imgagination.

I tried using the Win ME CD to repair something but it reverts to the old registry, best I can tell.

In DOS mode the system will stay up indefinitely..... no issues.

What suggestion do you have?

 

overheating?

 

apparently not.. it will stay up forever as long as I don't boot that winME load....

 

hmmm... ok this is new news.
I tried renaming the old Windows directory, then bypassing any files there while doing a new WinME install [at least, it seems thats what I succeeded in doing].
When the WinME setup process got to the point of discovering devices etc, it hung about halfway through, exactly as it was doing with the old config. I MUST have a device failing somewhere, right? and when that device gets "tickled" by Win, off we go. could be video?