@noiob did you switch from... I forget what is called, standard or compatibility mode, to acpi or vice versa? that makes most any Windows cranky, switching back can placate it
@Mycroft uh I think I had it mostly on fail-safe defaults before, and those don't work anymore. I'll look into it
@Mycroft uh, I don't think I can turn off ACPI at all?
@noiob yeah, just running setup from the hard drive makes installation faster, and had the side benefit of never asking to insert the cd if you change any settings
if you can boot to dos with cdrom support, I recommend copying the cd's \winme folder to the hard drive somewhere (like c:\winme) and running setup from there (if a reinstall is what you want to try)
... it might be \win9x instead, it's been so long...