please help...

i was just playing a game online (americas army) when i got a critical error... since i'm really impatient... i just pushed the restart button instead of waiting for the game to finish unloading...

after pressing the reboot button, i saw BSOD... with this...

Windows stopped loading to prevent blah, blah, blah...

Driver_IRQL_not_less_or_equal

-tells me how to fix it by disabling the bios memory options such as caching or shadowing (no clue how to do that)
-tells me to enter safe mode by pressing F8... but when i press F8... nothing happens

and then at the end of all this... it shows this:

afd.sys - address: (a bunch of alphanumeric characters here)
us30xp.sys - address: (a bunch of alphanumeric characters here)

my system:

xp sp2 corp ed...
geforce 4 mx 440
sound blaster live series
2.0 ghz
seagate 80 gb
norton antivirus
kerio firewall (closed when this happened)


one thing that really bothers me besides the fact that i c bsod and xp won't load is that nothing happens when i press F8 after that *beep* sound when u turn on your pc..


help me pls...

thanks

Those Driver_IRQL messages usually also give a filename of the driver causing the crash. You can use that to find out which device your faulty driver is associated with.
From your list, the first thing I would do is check that the latest WHQL'd drivers are installed for each device. Then I'd check what version of Kerio was running. If that turned out to be a 4.x version, I'd seriously consider going back to 2.1.5 (if you are an advanced user with a working knowledge of packet filtering) or changing to the free ZoneAlarm. Plus, check to make sure the built-in Windows Firewall is disabled, as two active software firewalls on the same computer aren't likely to get along very well with eachother.

Hope that helps...

EDIT: the "F-keys not working" could be because many keyboards today (and Microsoft keyboards in particular) assign new shortcuts to the F keys. Check if your F keys have other icons or text on them such as "Help", "Undo" "Spell" and so on. In order to make such a keyboard work with real F-keys, you have to find a key marked "F Lock" on your keyboard. If there is no such key, and you have a standard non-shortcutkey-equipped keyboard, it's likely a hardware error and a new keyboard might be in order. But be sure to test another keyboard with your computer first, before buying a new one, to make sure if the error is in the keyboard or somewhere else.