I took an educated guess because it kept happening at the same spot when loading the XP install. I thought it was the hard drive or motherboard. But it turns out my heavily used but loved NEC 3500 DVD-RW drive was the culprit. After disconnecting it and swapping it for another much beloved Pioneer DVD-RW, everything has gone smoothly. I never ran into this or many issues because I've hardly used this drive since moving it to another Desktop years ago. I actua........