I am running windows xp pro on a gateway 700x COMPUTER. I upgraded my Kodak program and when I restarted instead of going from the Gateway intro to the windows start up the screen stayed black with the flashing dash in the upper LEFT hand corner, then these really WEIRD symbols popped up, there were like 13 of them followed by the flashing dash. I manually rebooted and it did it again so I rebooted, repeatedly pressed F8 and it did it again except the symbols repeated themselves down the whole left side till it got to the bottom then the flashing dash again, what the heck is this???
My son said it happened to him last week. The only symbols we recognized were an unusual A and V, two spanish e's with the dashes above them, ad two exclamation points side by side. I have encountered alot of weird stuff WORKING on my computers but this was REALLY weird, anyone have ANY idea what I am talking about??? It restarted fine the next time. I don't wanna reformat as I do not have the resource disk (my nephew gave me this pc but lost the darn disks). Thanks for any help you can give.First of all, see, if it'll happen again.Sounds like it could be bad RAM or bad cache or something along those lines.

Even in the instance where it doesn't occur all the time.

Doubtful it is related at all to the OS install, however.