Hello,

By any chance do you remember what you changed?
Can you please s nd screenshots of the safe model?
And please tell me the version of Windows you're on

Sorry for the late reply I was away from home. I will update this message when I get the pictures and information gathered 😀 Thanks.

Edit: Alright just to show what started the problem:

Here on the General tab I have changed it earlier by unchecking one of the boxes. Afterwards I rebooted the PC and booted up like normal.
What changed was something related to the display's driver. That unknown device message showed up. At the time I wasn't thinking and I selected some driver from the list that I thought was what it needed. OK. I reboot again to take changed and boots into the system just fine. The startup programs are now all coming on until a message/error about my video adapter came up and the system restarted itself. Ever since then whenever I try to boot into the system, it just hangs/loads forever on the win98 screen.

Diagnosing:
What I have tried so far:

• The picture above is the CURRENT settings meaning I have tried to isolate the possibility that the problem was being caused by this. Even with everything unchecked I still cannot get passed the loading screen. This led to the problem, but have not caused it.
• I have looked at the bootlog.txt and found a loadfail referring to some/all fonts failure code being 0016... I looked that up and it seems there has been a pattern of people realizing that it has nothing to do with their problem 🤣. It's normal. But people have mentioned video cards/adapter/driverish issues...Leading into further discussions about IRQ and plug n play stuff..

Theories:
That damn display driver or whatever driver I put in for the system to use when I disabled that stuff on that utility has to be the cause. And the part where I vaguely remember S3 crying about something before it kept on failing is kind of my only lead atm.

I want to try to reinstall these drivers relating to displays/video cards but it's being a bit of a hassle at the moment. Any thoughts?

I'm not sure if I fixed it yet but I used the step-by-step confirmation and kept noticing how it stopped working when I got to the mouse driver.
So I went to look at the device manager and looked for the very next thing that came up which was an Intel LAN driver that I don't even use anymore.
I proceed to disable and reboot once more... I got in finally back into the system.. Now I gotta undo the generic drivers I put in on for the display stuff and make sure that all the programs that were disabled from startup are back.

can you also see what video card you have and find the right drivers and install them in safe mode?
IF you use the selective startup a lot of stuff won't work anyways, so you "should" always be able to start windows.
is it windows 98 or 95?

Win98. And yes I can see the name of the video card. But I still have to reinstall its proper driver/update but without being able to install anything in safe mode it's a little tricky. The problem with booting has taken an unexpected turn.. After I have disabled that one driver, whenever I would boot a message from 3COM and one from INTEL(R) Pro later regarding either the driver not installed yet.. And it kept adding itself into the list every time I booted in to the point where I got a windows protection error which was still related to all those identical drivers so I had to remove 3 drivers of itself to fix that and found the program responsible in the add/remove list so I killed it. >:/ Oh not to mention the constant blue screen probably from the graphics adapter not configured right because the screen is so blurred and messed up when that error happens. Now I'm trying put everything back in place.. Still don't know what will lead from here. I'll be damned if I can't use my PC card later because of this.

Wow the pc card doesn't work. Turns out that intel program is what handles PC cards but I might have had the full version. Maybe I can stick with the OEM provided version and see from there..

Can you try to boot up with only your video card in your computer?
Start windows from the command prompt like that:
in dos type this (without the

1 

):

1win /D 

install the drivers when you are in Windows, keep your fingers crossed 😉 and reboot.

If you can start in safe mode with the video card, you might want to try to install windows again (from safe mode) or to do a new windows install from dos.
If you have that kind of issues, a new install might be a good idea, if you didn't configure a lot of stuff, you might just want to copy your data to another drive / partition / folder and remove the windows folder.

you might want to use this to make your install smoother:
in dos, go to the drive where your windows 98 install files are and type this:

1 setup /ie /im /is /nr 

After that, add one card at the time and install the right drivers

That's not quite what I need.. Everything is working fine but just the PC card for connecting to networks isn't functioning right. I don't know if it's the software or the drivers related to it. When I look at the network data regarding packets sent, I am getting large numbers that don't make any sense and Tx and Rx errors. I am definitely backing up my system when I get this all cleared.