Computer start up problem

[randr]

I have a 5 year old win98 computer that I have been able to keep running rather well. Last night it froze up and nothing would run that I clicked on.
I did manage to turn it off and when I booted up again the same issue occurred. Nothing I clicked on worked. I could get into the windows start up and run programs by browsing through the directory.
I then rebooted using the reset button I heard a clicking noise coming from CPU. It began to perform a scan disc due to improper shut down. The cancel window appeared and started blinking and I had no control over the mouse.
I hit control/x and the blinking stopped, hit control /x again and scan disc stopped and system continued to load and started up just fine.
Shut down for the night and this morning I booted up with the same problem. Went through the same procedure and headed here for help.
Any suggestions?

[bemildred]

1. My first suspicion would be the hard drive.

You need to get it through a complete, successful run of scandisk. Try it in Safe Mode.
(Press the F8 repeatedly key while booting, then select safe mode when you get the menu.)
Then you can proceed to consider other possible issues.

You might also want to consider booting into Safe Mode as above and trying to copy your
important stuff to some other media, or getting professional help while there is still
some chance of that being done.

I recommend that you WAIT to see if any of the other wizards here have anything to say,
some of them are far more knowledgeable than I on these things ...

[hobbit709]

2. May be failing disk drive

If all the hardware is OK, then win98 never cleans up after itself and finally gets too cluttered up to work right. When scandisk comes up the mouse driver isn't loaded which is why no mouse. Here's a routine to dumping the files that Win98 won't let you get rid of or hides and says "files not found"

On boot hit F8 --You have to do this at boot-it won't work if you "Exit to DOS" from windows

Take the "COMMAND PROMPT ONLY" option

At the C: prompt type the following

SMARTDRV --Enter
CD WINDOWS --Enter
DELTREE /Y COOKIES --Enter (that's forward slash, not backslash)

DELTREE /Y HISTORY --Enter

DELTREE /Y TEMP --Enter

DELTREE /Y TEMPOR~1 --Enter

After each coomand wait for the C: prompt before the next command
The last two may take a while

This cleans up all the accumulated junk files that Win98 says its removed when you do a disk cleanup but it only sweeps them under the rug instead of throwing them out.

[randr]

3. I ran all the diagnostic programs I have

such as Fix-it and my window utilities.
They reported no problems.

[randr]

4. Well I did everything you both proposed

and all is back in better than recent shape.
Thank you very much.
No problems were found but a lot of files were deleted.
I have noticed that even though I do not use Windows Explorer, I mostly use Netscape, the explorer system still accumulates a cache. I also have Mozilla installed, which I seldom use, and it does the same.
Is there a way to stop these programs from building cache files?

[bemildred]

5. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox have settings for "cache size" or something.

In my experience, browsers do not always do a good job of cleaning up,
so I periodically manually delete cache and temp files and clean my
cookies. Mozilla/Firefox are more "friendly" about these issues, once
you take the time to get aquainted with their controls.

[randr]

6. Thanks again---will do