Windows XP hanging at startup?

I've got an unusual problem that I've never seen before with XP. Whenever I boot up the system half of the time it wil get to the black startup screen and just sit there. The other half of the time it boots up normally, but this is definately annoying to have this issue.

Anyone have any tips or tricks to get the system to boot normally everytime?

System specs are:
EPOX 9NPA3 SLI
AMD 3800+
1gb Mushkin DDR
WD 160GB 3GB/S SATA HDD
LiteOn DVD Writer
ATI X1800 (ya I know its an ATI on an Nforce board)
Winfast TV Tuner card

Any thoughts?

Do you have any cathodes installed? I had that same issue accept it would happen all the time, it would take about 5 minutes to load completely! After a day or two of trouble shooting i found it to be a bad cathode light, just a thought. Also; try running memtest86, could be a memory issue also.

have you tried hitting F8 and do a safe mode startup? It may give the old press escape to cancel loading XXX file. If it does google the file and see if it has an update.

I had a similar problem but it was caused by a .dll that was freezing my pc and when I rebooted I got a black screen for 5 mins. It was doing something with system restore I think.

Start | Run | Type msconfig, and click OK | Under the "Boot.ini" tab of the System Configuration Utility, put a check next to /BOOTLOG and click OK | On next reboot a file called Ntbtlog.txt will be created in the Windows directory. The log file may be able to help lead you in a direction in which to look regarding your boot problem. This is only used for troubleshooting, as the generated log file will keep increasing in size after each subsequent reboot... so make sure to uncheck the /BOOTLOG switch after you determine you don't need to continue logging.

The following MSKB articles may also be of some help to you...

How to troubleshoot by using the System Configuration utility in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=310560

How to perform advanced clean-boot troubleshooting in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=316434