Kristy, are ya there? I can try to help you walk through a reinstall. Now, is it a Dell? Or something else? If it is a dell (recent - within the last couple years) there is a symatec partition that can be restored back to factory delivery state. But I won't know until I talk to you. Sorry, I was asleep when you called last nite. So sorry. (Cold medicine). Give me a call, and we'll see if we can either walk you through a reinstall, or get you to a place where you can start to run a virus cleaner. If it is that bad for this particular problem, you may want to wipe and reinstall. I'm hoping you can just do a system restore back to factory specs. We can also see if we can fix your system files if you don't have the disks.

It seems strange that the BSOD only happens at startup and shutdown, it suggests corrupt files to me. Assuming you have the W98SE CD you could run the System File Checker (sfc) to check for corrupt or missing files. Do not put the CD in the drawer unless asked. Click Start, click Run and type sfc and hit OK. Your computer will test Windows and may well ask you for guidance, this will only be in cases where the installed driver is newer than the original so you would not allow the computer to change that back. If it finds corrupt files it may/will ask for your CD. Christopher wrote I have done all the clean up and virus checks What does that mean? Can you list the task for us please? What anti virus, firewall and other safety programs are you running? I see you have a built in Verge S# video card, the latest driver available from ECS is dated 2004/07/03, you probably have those so updating may not be needed. Try clicking Start/Control panel/System/Device manager and look down the list for yellow marks, either exclamtion or question marks. Double click on anything to bring up Properties and have a looksee. Any irregularities?

STOP: 0x00000050 suggests a video card driver may be at fault. Ever updated your video driver? If you do not know what video card you have click Start/Control panel/System/Hardware/Device manager. Now look down the list and double click on Display adaptors. You can then go to the appropriate site and see if updated drivers are available for your machine. Have you been inside the case or moved the tower at all? Check the video cable is securely fastened at both ends. If you have a separate video card as opposed to built into the motherboard ensure it is seated properly AFTER shutting down, removing the power cable from the rear and resting you bare hand or arm on the metal case frame to ground yourself.

I stand corrected after looking around here is what I found my point was it is a different type of error, but your right still called a blue screen: The blue screen of death frequently occurs in Microsoft's home desktop operating systems Windows 95, 98, and Me. Here it is usually less serious, but much more common. In these operating systems, the BSOD is the main way for virtual device drivers to report errors to the user. It is internally referred to by the name of "_VWIN32_FaultPopup". A Windows 9x/Me BSOD gives the user the option either to restart or continue. However, VxDs do not display BSODs frivolously  they usually indicate a problem which cannot be fixed without restarting the computer, and hence after a BSOD is displayed the system is usually unstable or unresponsive. Two of the most common reasons for BSODs are: Problems that occur with incompatible versions of DLLs. This cause is sometimes referred to as DLL hell. Windows loads these DLLs into memory when they are needed by application programs; if versions are changed, the next time an application loads the DLL it may be different from what the application expects. These incompatibilities increase over time as more new software is installed, and is one of the main reasons why a freshly-installed copy of Windows is more stable than an "old" one. Faulty or poorly written device drivers, hardware incompatibilities, or damaged hardware may also cause a BSOD. If you have just installed a new piece of hardware, updated a driver, or installed an Operating System update shortly before you see the BSOD, be sure to investigate these causes also. In Windows 95 and 98, a BSOD occurred when the system attempted to access the file "c:\con\con" on the hard drive. This was often inserted on websites to crash users' machines. Microsoft has released a patch for this.[4] The BSOD can appear if a user ejects a removable medium while it is being read on 9x/ME. This is particularly common while using Microsoft Office: if a user simply wants to view a document, he might eject a floppy disk before exiting the program. Since Microsoft Office always creates a temporary file in the same directory, it will trigger a BSOD upon exiting because it will attempt to delete the file on the disk that is no longer in the drive. This type of blue screen is no longer seen in Windows NT, 2000, and XP. In the case of these less serious software errors, the program may still crash, but it will not take down the entire operating system with it due to better memory management and decreased legacy support. In these systems, the "true" BSOD is seen only in cases where the entire operating system crashes.