It was okay this morning andit was working fine although very slow. I installed an antivirus on the computer (avira) and then shut it down to restart it. It doesnt BOOT up now, all I get when the computer starts is the initial windows XP splash screen with the logo and then it goes away and I have a black screen with a blinking cursor in the TOP left. And when I shut it down again and restarted it after that, I went through the splash screen and then some windows writing showed up followed by the words "keyboard FAILURE". I DISCONNECTED the keyboard and it still SAYS "Keyboard failure" when I restart. Weird.

I cant even get to safe mode by pressing f8. What doI do
Is it possible that this system may have been experiencing a hardware failure that caused the performance loss and now it has reached its critical point of serious failure.

Is this keyboard a standard PS2 type or USB, and what was the nature of this system leading up to this point? How old is this computermake/model and how much ram, and did you make any hardware changes or upgrades to it recently?