From: "Frank Haber" 

This is an ignorant response, but on any XP machine that's trojan-clean and
in the hands of a decently smart user, yet bluescreens or stalls
intermittently at boot.....

I rip out all the USB connectors and reinstall them in binary-tree
faultfinding mode, varying hub brands as I go.  Nothing hangs NT boots like
bad USB.  Roughly 60% of boot hangs are USB overload, I find.  Sometimes
you just need fewer devices, or fewer on each (root) hub.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5