I am currently having this same problem with two different Motherboards -- an MSI KT4AV with an AMD Duron 1800 processor, and an ABIT KV7 with an AMD Athlon XP 3200+. Both systems have AGP video cards based on vastly differing generations (one geforce 6600GT, one geforce 2 mx400) Both Computers run fine in Windows 2000 until I play America's Army for a while -- the time can vary. The shutdown is sudden and without warning -- then the speaker beeps an alternating High/Low tone like a European police siren. I can't reboot them immediately, but I only have to wait about 30 seconds before they will boot successfully. If I immediately check the CPU temp with the BIOS, it is 40-49 deg. C. -- so it seems unlikely that this is a temperature problem, unless the CPU's are reliably failing well below their rated max temps. I have had the problem on one of the systems where I couldn't even boot to windows - just like this other fellow, but I seem to have solved that by clearing CMOS memory -- that was on the MSI KT4AV. My experiments (planned out, not haphazard by the way) have ruled out power supplies, CPU chips, video cards, wall power supply, memory, motherboards, temperature, and phase of the moon. By the way, both of these systems will run for days with no problem if I stay away from games.I've researched this extensively on the net, and generally people have no idea what this is caused by. I have almost 30 years of experience with microprocessors (starting in 1976 with an Altair 8800), and I haven't seen this before -- now I've got it on two systems -- how unlikely is that if it's a hardware problem? I've only found three people on the net that spoke about this with any confidence: two mentioned a virus, and the other mentioned AGP speed. Because of everything I just mentioned, I am now virtually certain that this is caused by a virus. Let me explain:If you dismount the heatsink from an AMD Athlon or Duron Socket A processor and turn on the system, it will immediately fail with this behavior (tried it!) -- so this is a legitimate CPU failure alarm.Thus, many of the reports of this failure are probably just that -- CPU Failure. But that doesn't explain those of us who have sudden outbreaks of this problem on multiple systems.I can also stop this problem by slowing the processor down to about half its rated speed.With those facts in mind, imagine some semi-intelligent sociopath figures out that you can give an AMD CPU a certain series of instructions that confuse it enough that motherboards with AMI bioses think that it has failed -- or that actually cause the processor to fail suddenly, but not permanently. Then let's say that maybe this only works when the CPU is already stressed out by, say, a CPU intensive game program (that would explain why it isn't effective at half clock speed).I have no explanation for the systems that simply won't boot, and transfer the infection without the disk drive attached. That's one for the AMD people to tackle.As for me, I'm going to to looking for fixes to the Blaster/Lovesan worms, because I have nothing better to do -- my system crashes if I play games!
