I have just built a new machine MSI MOBO, AMD sempron 64 3000+, 1 GB RAM, the MOBO has onboard GFX and it has a SATA HDD.

The initial boot is fine, I get the blue screen when win xp starts to install.

When I get to the press f6 if you want to install 3rd party drivers (which I want to do) the install process stops (whether I hit f6 or not).

Any ideas what may be causing this, I have checked all connections, I am thinking maybe faulty ram, but have not been able to swap it out yet.

Any ideas gratefully received

Try setting (in the BIOS) non-turbo mode. I've experienced this with SATA drive installs where some motherboards come slightly overclocked. e.g. ABIT motherboards (Fatal1ty) come slightly overclocked and that was enough for Windows XP installs to lockup/fail. Deliberately underclocking the machine for whatever reason Microsoft couldn't explain to me got the install process to proceed. Once the install was complete and all drivers necessary for the new motherboard were installed then setting the overclocking back to default (or even overclocking some more) usually worked OK.

The other possibility is that your floppy may not be recognized (F6 process). Check the floppy on another machine and make sure that your floppy is properly configured in the new MOBO.

Good luck

Casey