Boot Fails(windows)

Alright, i'm getting very frustrated over this issue for a couple months now.

It seems that whenever i boot into win xp, it will freeze on the boot screen, or just restart. To which i have to redo 8 or so times just to make it work. But when it's finally loaded, it works fine.

My specs:
Motherboard: Abit VP6
CPU: Coppermine Pentium III 850Mhz
Memory: 850MB(4 sticks)
Video Card: VSI Geforce 4 MX 440se
Sound Card: Soundblaster XGamer 5.1
Harddrive 1: 40GB Western Digital (Primary)
Harddrive 2: 10GB IBM (Slave)
Network: Linksys Fast Ethernet 10/100

At first, i tried what i could. I did the memtest86 test, removed memory sticks and eliminated that. Changed out power supplys. Removed network card. So i figured maybe i somehow corrupted my xp install, so i reformated to windows 2000 pro. Seemed alright until i installed Service pack 3. Then it happened all over again and now i can't even boot at all(just can't get past the boot screen).

I can get into BIOS just fine, to which i've reset time and time again. And i did have a dual boot into red hat linux, which never seemed to fail, but i remember once. But stupid me, my install of win 2k overwrote the dual booter.

So i pulled out this old gateway system i had and put in the video card, network card and hard drive, and it works fine so they can't be the problem. (All these parts here are a year or less old)

My conclusion is the CPU. It's about 3-4 years old. My roommates and i are just baffled over what is causing it. Since we don't have a backup p3, we can't tell for sure. I'm hoping it's not the motherboard, i mean since it's a good name brand.

Any ideas?

sounds like either the MB or the processor, you should have them both checked and see.

luck,
robert