For about a month, month and a half my system worked fine. Then out of nowhere it started acting like it had picked up a virus. Programs crashed, I had popups, etc

I was unable to open Task Manager
I formatted my hard drive. After formatting and installing XP Home again, -AS SOON AS- WINDOWS started up, it said that it had recovered from a serious error and that it had 159 critical system errors and told me to get a registry fixer.

I obtained Registry Mechanic and ran it. It told me that I had a corrupted registry and that it WOULD fix it,.

It did little good. Programs still either crashed or refused to install at all citing numerous errors each time.

I tried running multiple spyware/virus scanning and removing utilities but each time they eaither detect nothing or detect a minor problem and tell me that they fix it but I am still having the same exact problems of programs crashing or not installing at all.

Registry mechaning still constantly detects corrupted registry files.

I have formatted multiple times and each time Windows installs, it tells me that there is a currupted registry and I still have the software crash/refusal to install problems

I run registry mechanic every so often and it always tells me I have errors and that it fixes the errors but still no IMPROVEMENT in my system.

Just today I opened the system up, removed the ram and CR2032 battery on the mobo and REPLACED them.

Since doing this, I tried to format again but my Windows CD is not autodetected when the system reboots even though I have the boot order set to boot from CD first

I am at my wits end. This is a brand new computer not even three months old. I am ready to try anything. Please, please, PLEASE, any advice would be greatly appreciatedReseat your RAM and see if it will boot.

Formatting a hard drive removes ALL the data from the disk so I don't believe you are reformatting it.

You are probably restoring it or something.

Get back to booting to the cdrom with the xp disk in.If you are convinced that you reformatted it, you probably did a quick format. Try doing a full format on all partitions and Hard Disk Drives connected.