I haven’t dealt with Windows in a while, but the advice to save the drivers to disk is good. I’d especially recommend saving any updates that are required to get online. I don’t like working in 16 color 640X480 mode during setup, but if you can’t get online, you can’t update anything. I used to keep all the drivers I had to download on one CD, so I didn’t have to do the treasure hunt thing again if I had to do a clean install.
Is 16-bit the reason why it looks like it's in safe mode, do you think? And installing the graphics driver should fix that? Thanks for your post - I am probably going to be out there later tonight working on the PC.