After a power interuption when I restart my computer it goes through the boot process and when it gets to the desktop it restarts and goes on with this loop until I am quick enough to hit the START menu, turn off computer and then restart. It is a custom built computer, I am using Windows XP, there are no error messages, the motherboard is an MSI - 7142 with an AMD Sempron 2800+, 1.60 GHz, 768 MB of RAM it has been doing this since day 1. other than this problem the computer works fine.
Any ideas?

ThanksDwayne...

To prevent this in the future...you may want to look into purchasing an Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS). A good ONE starts at about $100...I got mine from APC. It's a combination battery backup and surge suppressor...just for situations such as yours...where a power interruption could DAMAGE your SYSTEM. It's a good investment and will give you plenty of time to save what you've been working on, so you can safely shut down your computer.

With the above in mind...do you currently use a surge suppressor? If you do...please remove it...and try turning your computer back on to see if you're still experiencing the same problem. Sometimes surge suppressors can fail after a major spike such as what you've described, or from a lightning strike.

There may be the possibility your hard drive was affected when this happened and has CAUSED corruption of some of your boot files...causing the computer to loop at boot.