🚀 go-pugleaf

andy@orchid.bdc.ubc.ca (Andrew Dwelly) writes:

>I'm having a really strange problem with a PC with sysmptoms
>sufficiently bizarre that I'm posting this in the hope that it 
>might jog someones memory. The PC in question is an AE 386 running 
>Dos 5.0

>The symptoms were that the system hung during a printscreen, 
>and then consistently hung during rebooting. I narrowed down the 
>boot problem to the DEVICE=\dos\ansi.sys line in confiig.sys. Remming 
>this out allows a reboot to complete.

>After the reboot, any substantial program (Word, gauss, nfsrun) will 
>hang/whilst constantly printing out the screen to the printer - like 
>a stuck print screen key.

First of all, you have to understand that the folks at IBM who designed
the PC did a *major* no-no. They used interrupts that Intel had listed
as "reserved for future use". One of them is INT 5 which they assigned
to "print screen". This is used in 286 and later processors to signal
an error condition (I forget which). 

So if your BIOS is a bit lame, anything that causes the CPU to have that
error condition will cause a succesion of print screens! I've seen it on 
earely 286 machines many a time and it occasionally happens on even newer
machines (there's only so much the BIOS can do to attempt to determine
whether the INT 5 is an error condition or a legit print scrteen request.

-- 
Leonard Erickson		      leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com
CIS: [70465,203]			 70465.203@compuserve.com
FIDO:   1:105/51	 Leonard.Erickson@f51.n105.z1.fidonet.org
(The CIS & Fido addresses are preferred)