Upgrade to Win XP SP2 Disaster!!!

All,

After upgrading my win xp desktop (specs in sig) and rebooting, i get as far as the windows xp splash screen before getting a BSOD with a irq_less_than_equal type error and filtnt.sys error that i googled and found to be associated with a firewall software program called outpost which i had installed on the machine. In any case, outpost is set to start on reboot, but because it's conflicting with something in SP2, it keeps forcing a BSOD. I'm caught in an endless loop.

So i thought that i could book into safe mode and disable the outpost firewall from starting upon reboot, however as my machine is booting and i hit F8 (to get me to the advanced windows option to select boot in safe mode), instead of giving me an option to boot in safe mode, instead i get a select boot drive screen (probably from the bios) and i get my cd-rom, floppy, and digital media card readers as options. It's almost as if the bios took the reserved F8 key that should normally bring me to the boot in safe mode option screen, and instead replaced it with this stupid other screen.

Can anyone offer any ideas or advice on what to do? I have a call into Asus (motherboard maker) but you know how tech support at a large firm goes, it's a hit or miss. I've gone into the bios to see if there is a setting there, but to no avail. my motherboard model is the K8V SE Deluxe for i believe 754 socket. HELP PLEASE

I believe its an AMI motherboard

I did finally get a hold of a techie at Asus who said that i'm hitting the F8 too soon, and that's why it's taking me to the select boot device screen (which is a characteristic of AMI motherboards as he described it). He says i need to hit F8 when the bios is no longer controlling the machine and windows is beginning to take over....

however, last night (i'm at work now) i must have spent over an hour hitting the F8 keys at various points along the bootup process and either i get the select boot device screen or nothing happens. Another interesting thing, the select boot device screen doesn't have my hard drive listed in the menu and the techie said that's a reason for concern. He was telling me that perhaps the machine was not recognizing a hard drive at all and that's why my machine is not working. But i told him, the windows xp splash screen comes up and the little timer thing that goes from left to right as window's is loading moves back and forth like 3 times before the BSOD with the error message. And i told him that the error message is specific to the outpost drivers so it must be accessing the hard drive.

the techie then told me that it might be the SATA hard drive that i'm using, since the SATA connectors on the mobo weren't on the southbridge directly like IDE is and therefore, there might be some issues with the upgrade to win xp sp2 and the way my SATA drive is not being accessed correctly!!!!

arghhhhh, i dunno, all i want to do is boot into safe mode. SOS SOS SOS

I Fixed It!!!

thanks guys for trying to help me. I finally fixed it. in order to get into boot safe mode option screen, i simply turned my machine off when i got the win xp splash screen, then next time i booted up, i automatically was put into the select safe boot mode screen

once i got into my windows desktop in safe mode, i uninstalled outpost firewall and now my machine is working well

i guess i need to wait for the outpost firewall software update in order to get it to work with my machine and sp2

thanks ewolf, it worked