its almost certainly video or sound related. something is crashing when windows accesses its hardware. I am sending the system back. I installed a 3d game on it and in windows xp it would instantly bsod, and in win2k it would bsod in anywhere from 5 seconds to a minute. all i can figure is perhaps xp is using more graphics memory than 2k does to start with and there is a bad memory chip on the video card.