Windows XP Home Freeze on Load Screen

System:
Athlon 64 x2 3800+
2x 1gb Gskill Ram
Jetway 939gt4 Motherboard
EVGA GeForce 8600gt
700W Rocketfish PSU
Creative Soundblaster Live 24bit.
160 gb IDE HD (Old HD so I don't know the make)
Western Digital 320gb SATA HD

Hey I've been having a problem loading Windows XP lately. I had made no software or hardware changes when one day Windows XP would not get past the loading screen with the blue bar. It would move across 20 or so times and just freeze. I had to manually restart and after trying five times or so it never made it past the loading screen. Then I tried running my pc in safe mode off the same HD when the "windows did not start properly" prompt appeared and that worked without a hitch. I tried to system restore, remove my most recent programs, registry cleaning, antivirus, antispyware, and chkdsk, but to no avail. I would also like to add that both my HD's are running windows xp and the IDE HD works everytime. Also RAID drivers are installed (a solution people had to a similar problem). I tried disconnecting and reconnecting my SATA HD with different SATA ports and different SATA power connecters, but I had the same problem.

I deduced that my problem was some sort or virus or corrupted file in windows, so I formatted and reinstalled windows. Everything worked perfectly that night and restarted normally every time. Again it worked the next morning, but the following night I had the same problem with the loading screen. I did a system restore and removed my most recent program and it worked again. And finally this morning it isn't working again. Truly I have no idea what the problem could be. Also I feel like I have exhausted any possible troubleshoot I could think of.

I know this is a lengthy post, but I wanted to give everyone ALL the information I have gathered, especially that one HD boots normally and the other after a clean install does not. Thank you for any suggestions and let me know if there are any other tests I should run or things I should check and I'll get back to you.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

Do you have Windows Update set to automagically install patches? I had issues with a Win2K Server system that I had installed the latest Updates on last week. It would get to the point right before the login screen would come up and then just sit there. For Evar. Ended up getting rid of these patches and it came right back up:

KB956390
KB957095
KB956391
KB954211


YMMV and the issues may be totally unrelated.

g

Could also be a failing HDD. Sounds quite like it.

Thanks for the replies. I finally got it to work by removing firefox 3.03, defragging, and restarting repeatedly until all windows updates were installed and that solved the problem, for now. Speaking of the failing HD, I was surfing posts about my problem and found out I should take a look at Event Viewer. Found something disheartening: Warning Event ID 51 "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a paging operation." Upon looking under Disk Management I found that drive D was my boot 320 SATA HD. Any ideas about what this means? It would be sad if my new HD is indeed failing. It's a Western Digital and this is my second one in 2 months.