That was the first thing I checked - to see if somehow the Power options had been changed. Everything is set to Always On, nothing should be shutting down or going to sleep or on standby without me telling it to.
Plus there's the fact that I'm getting the "recovered from a serious error" message when it reboots.
I've updated the audio and video drivers - and installed the one WinXP update that was available. There were also two other driver updates at MS Update, one for my scanner, which I successfully downloaded and installed. The other was for something called Amyuni Document Converter 300 and there was a message saying I should install it because it appeared that the device that used it wasn't operating properly.
It successfully downloaded but several repeat attempts to have MS Update install it resulted in a failure message with no other useful information provided - none of the links MS provides go to anything that deals with this update specifically.
Googling around I saw some stuff indicating that this driver is something needed for a printer, and/or also something that Intuit programs use (I use Quicken) but going to the Amyuni website hasn't yielded anything so far (didn't have time to plow through all their forums yet).
Also, according to Device Manager, all my hardware is working properly. So I don't know what MS Update is referring to.
I did find a "Quicken PDF Printer" in my Printers folder and it does appear to be using the Amyuni software; I went through the properties for it and when I found the place where drivers could be installed, the driver it wanted was in my Quicken folder but Windows returned an error when I tried to install it.
I deleted the "printer" and I'll see what happens when I open Quicken. I don't print things from the Quicken program so maybe it was something I didn't need that was just fouling up the works - but I haven't made any changes in Quicken and the program hasn't updated itself recently, so who knows.
I went to take a shower while I ran a virus scan and came back 20 minutes later to find it had shut down and rebooted again. However the virus scan reports that it was completed and didn't find anything. I've also tried to run the registry scan/cleanup but every time I do I end up walking away and when I come back, you guessed it, another reboot. And that scan doesn't finish so I wonder if it's trying to run in the background anyway while the system is idle and that's where the problem is.
OTOH, now that I think about it, I didn't have that scan set to run automatically until after all this started - so that's probably not it either.
I don't know what else to do but sit here in front of the thing and not touch it and see what happens that might be causing the shutdown.
UPDATE: Great minds think alike, lol. Yeah, I may just have to sit here until I get the blue screen and see what it says. Anyway - I'm gonna do a deliberate restart and see if the Quicken printer is back again or not.
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