i am positive that it is a RAM error. the ram is either faulty or has a
leak. this happened to me more than a few times, so i found just to buy good
ram from an established dealer. ciao!

"TMack" wrote in message
.. .

"Toby Newman" wrote in message
om...
Okay, here's the info:

I tried setting the FSB to minimum (100x6 or something ridiculous!),
disabling L1 cache, and swapping the memory for a different DIMM, made
by a different manufacturer, and in a different DIMM slot on the
motherboard.

Under each of the above circumstances, I ran Memtest, and each time a
stream of errors were reported after about 2 minutes, once it reached
"test 4":

Test: 4
Pass: 0
Failing Address:0001ffba488 - 511.6MB
Good: fffffb
Bad: f6f6f6f6
Err bits: 0909090d
Count: 1
Chan: (nothing in this column)

...and so on for increasing values of "Failing Address" etc. The
errors just stream by.

What on earth is causing this problem? To reiterate, disabling L1
cache in the bios allows XP to boot very slowly, but enabling it
causes a ntoskrnl or hal.dll is "corrupt or missing" error.

At a guess I would say your motherboard's memory control circuits are
flaky.
It is possible but less likely that the cpu is flaky. . You could test
this by trying your existing cpu and memory in another motherboard.

Tony