I have a home built computer that has been running perfectly for about 5 yrs. It has an MSI (K7T266 pro2), one gig of RAM, 1.6 AMD Athlon chip running win xp pro.
As of this morning the machine boots to the point of recognizing the hardware and whether its working etc, at this point it hangs and will not boot any further. Appreciate any ideas on this problem, thanks.

Have you tried checking your bios or maybe resetting it back to the default? It might have a problem with trying to recognize your hard drive with the OS.

Yes thanks, I removed the small battery on the motherboard and checked it with my meter to see if it was still alive and then replaced it about 15 minutes later . To the best of my knowledge that should reset the motherboard to default settings. In the meantime I'll check the manual and see if there are jumpers I can reset. :) I forgot to mention that I used three different drives with three different OS on them Vista, Xphome and win 2000 prol

Thanks for any comeback to my question, It seems that the re-set to default did the trick.
The machine is back in action with some small anomalies, but these can be adjusted.