That same Inspiron 8000 unit is back again - this time when it boots it gets to about 2/3 of the loading bar on the W2K screen, then blue screens with the 'if this is the first time you have seen this, reboot' message.

Booted fine out of the docking station after I flipped it over and checked all the connections again.

The events logs show interesting errors like 'unable to create thread' and the like when booting.

I got it booted, so now I am ghosting all partitions to images, which I will store on the server. I think perhaps we may have a CPU or memory problem. I'm leaning towards memory being the culprit. There were several event log entries regarding various .cpp files not being able to run due to insufficient memory space on a 128mb machine which shows only 123mb...