error logs?

Ive been having an odd problem with windows xp pro getting to the welcome screen and then just shutting down, and was wondering if windows kept an error log somewhere for crashes like this, and if so where it is so I can get more of an idea whats causing the problem.

Well you probably want to take a look at this microsoft knowledge base articile, it deals with booting issues:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308041

This article deals with booting into safe mode, which will make it alot easier to find the issue. You can also activate boot logging (described in this article). If you can't find anything in the xp event logs, then the boot log might be helpful:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;315222