Many problems that one may experience on Windows XP are because of incompatible drivers. Whenever you install a driver, XP tries to verify its compatibility but sometimes 3rd party drivers are not compatible and the check during the installation is skipped, which may result in problems for your computer.

Windows XP provides a signature verification tool which can be used to verify the drivers. It ensures that the drivers are reliable and are unlikely to cause problems on your computer.

To check if you have any unsigned driver, do:

• Click Start->Run.
• Type “sigverif” without quotes and press Enter or click Ok.
• Click on Advanced; Select the option “Look for other files that are not digitally signed“.
• Click on Browse and navigate to C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers
• Click on Ok and then on Start.
• The driver files which are not signed will be shown.

Once you know which drivers are unsigned, you can move the unsigned drivers to a backup folder. Now restart your computer and then test if the program or other functionality to see whether the same error messages or issues still occurs.

If the issue no longer occurs, the issue was caused by a third-party unsigned filter or function driver.

Note: If for some reason your computer doesn’t starts or you receive an error message “At least one driver or service failed to start…”, then you should move the drivers one by one to the drivers folder, to see which one of them caused the problem.