Many Thanks for your reply, I was rather hoping not to have to be corresponding with you again so soon.
this is being posted from the errant PC as I've now managed to regain access to Safe Mode with Neworking.
I suspect that's more by good luck than skill on my part, and may not be repeatable so I'd rather not re-boot until it is strictly necessary.
Disabling most things via MSConfig doesn't seem to help.
Also tried System Restore to before the MS Updates, I only have 3 points available, but whist the process seems to complete in each attempt, it doesn't help the situation. Would I be a mile away thinking that it's probably driver clash rather than registry related?
If it's of any help, the PC is BSOD on normal bootup, which then auto re-starts, even though the relevant check box is unticked and the registry entry is set to zero. On the second attempt, I then get the message to the effect of "Windows didn't start correctly last time." and a selection of safe mode options etc. I then selected Safe Mode with Networking, which is where I am now.
Safe mode eventually does start after hanging on aswrvrt for quite a while
If however I interrupt the boot sequence by pressing F8, then I get a different menu of Safe mode options, but they all seem to hang permenantly after aswrvrt (well at least for an hour or more as I eventually gave up and went to bed.)
I'm running a dual monitor setup; on a normal boot attempt BIOS starts as normal, on what would nowmally become my second screen, Raid drivers load, and the XP splash screen starts on the same monitor and progresses for a while; The keyboard Lock LEDs flash and just about when I would expect the second larger monitor to spring into life and take over as primary monitor , I get the Monitor loss of signal l message on it, and a brief flash of BSOD on the first screen, followed by a forced re-boot.
As mentioned in an earlier post, everything has been performing faultlessly after your previous assistance; this issue arose after some recent microsoft security updates.
My only delay in getting the XP operating system off this RAID array has been due to corresponding with various software vendors to find a suitable program which will handle migrating XP to SSD off a software RAID array, whilst still giving XP access to the remaining data on the other partitions. I think/hope Paragon 14 will do it.
NirSoftBluescreenView doesn't register any BSODs as there doesn't seem to be a minidump for it to analyse.
The box was ticked, but no "Small Memory Dump" seems to get written. I wonder if this is related to the failure to disable auto re-start after BSOD??