XP Boot Stops on Mup.sys

My mother-in-laws eMachines W2247 locked up about a week ago and when it rebooted the safe mode option screen came up. Choosing "start windows normally" gives a black screen and then no further progress. All of the safe mode options stop at loading mup.sys and then lock up.

I've poured through all of the internet advice I could on this and I'm still hitting a brick wall. I've tried the following:

1) using the eMachines restore CD's (eMachines doesn't provide a Win XP CD). The same error condition occurred which led me to believe it was a hardware issue.

2) Reset the BIOS using the motherboard jumper, per some posts I read disabled APCI (think I have that right), and reset ESCD. More recently I finally found the Flash BIOS for the motherboard a FIC AM37 and I flashed it as well.

3) Disconnected the CDROM, USB, Floppy Drive to isolate them from the equation. Reseated the memory. Swapped the power supply with another I had laying around.

4) Removed the hard drive from the PC and connected it to another PC with XP installed. Was able to chkdsk, defrag, and scan it for viruses, no issues found. I did this before the restore process so at least I was able to back up data.

It seems like I've eliminated everything. If I can flash the BIOS on the motherboard and everything seems fine and find no problems after running the hard disk utilities I'm not sure where to turn next. The video is onboard, in fact the PC has nothing new installed since it was purchased. I disabled both the LPT and COM ports in BIOS at one point to make sure it wasn't there.

I went out and bought some floppies so I could run the six disk recovery console and I ran all the utilities (fixboot, fixmbr *but again this is after restoring the original ghost image, the software should be clean) that I could think of, turning off every non-vital service.

This is insane, what have I forgotten? I suppose it could still be the motherboard or hard drive but I can't think of any way to confirm either of those that I haven't already explored.

HELP!!

 

Could be the motherboard.
I had a similar problem with the computer I'm using right now. I had some bulging, leaking capacitors on the motherboard. I found that if I booted to the bios and monitored the system temps, when it got warmed up, I could exit the bios without changing any settings, and it would load up. I used this method of startup for a month before I got caps to replace the bad ones. After I got the new caps installed, I haven't had any problems at startup.
Hope that helps.

 

Dam you have tried everything under the sun to no avail.. I did a little google and HERE is a long discussion about the very same problem some fixed theirs, i never read all the way through it.

I read also that for one person it was his USB mouse,he unpluged his USB mouse when it was at your problem stage and it carried on booting all the way. I mention it just incase..

I also noticed while reading up on this that there is quite a lot of peopel getting this very same problem.

Good luck..