laptop won't boot

[canooten]

I'm looking at a coworkers laptop and can't pinpoint the problem.....

Machine is an older Dell Lattiude running Win98 (it's running 98 by choice....I think it's about a 1ghz machine). Apparently the owner has Norton System Works on the machine and runs Speed Disk from time to time.
Last time he ran it, he rebooted and it won't start except for Safe Mode now.
When you boot normally, you get a DOS screen with the following

==============

c:\>SET tvdumpf logs=10

c:\>SET tvdumpf logs=8

c:\>

==============

I googled these messages and found several references to ZoneAlarm updates gone bad. The laptop runs ZoneAlarm, so I uninstalled in Safe Mode and still get the same thing. On the initial reboot after uninstalling ZA it looked like it might boot normally....I got a "Please wait while setup updates your configuration files....." scrreen, then got a BSOD with the reference -18F :BFC06EDF. I got out of that and got a black screen with a cursor (looked like Windows might load again) and it locked there.

Now I get the same tvdumpf references when I try to boot normally.

Any suggestions?

 

[ramdge]

You could use the F8 key, then choose Step by Step and skip
the items in the config.sys or autoexec.bat that you are
not familiar with or that you think might be causing the
problem.

You might have to try this several times to find out which
ones are causing it not to go into windows. If it is something
in config.sys or autoexec.bat then you could comment them
out then see how the computer runs without them loaded.