Ok guys, here's the deal. I recently needed to format my hard drive because of spyware. My hard drive was running Windows 98, so naturally I just formated the drive in FAT 32 and attempted to reinstall Windows 98 using the same installation CDs from the previous install. Only when I installed this time, my computer got stuck on the reboot part of the installation where it says "Preparing to run Windows for the first time" as it just rebooted again randomly on me. So this time I tried step-by-step confirmation and found that no matter if I chose yes or no to install msmouse.vxd, my computer reboots on me. Now, I've looked at previous forums about booting into safe mode and then doing something to edit the registry, but unfortunately, my computer reboots on me even when I try to run safe mode. I even tried renaming the file msmouse.old, and extracting (in DOS) msmouse.vxd from the Windows 98 installation CD, but my computer still reboots on me when I get to the msmouse.vxd step in the step-by-step confirmation. Hmmmm... could it be that I used a Western Digital diagnostics CD application (and not a DOS boot floppy) to format the drive for Windows 98SE, and I only have the installation CDs for just plain old Windows 98? I shouldn't think that makes a difference, though, because my hard drive still was formated to FAT 32. I don't know where to go here. Please help!

http://www.geeknewz.com/board/index.php?showtopic=621&hl=

Any tips in that topic that'll help you at all?

It seems odd that your computer would reboot on you suddenly. That usually idicates overheating or a corrupted file... and I doubt it's an overheating issue since you were able to cover the majority of the installation.