Huge emergency. Locks up at welcome screen!

[vumpler]

Ok huge problem. Was fixing my friends pc (he dropped it off for the weekend for me to fix.) Turns out he hasn't installed any updates since he bought the PC. It has home XP OEM ;/. It's a dell dimension 8200. Anyway Here's what I did. I ran norton 2004 and found and fixed some problem. Installed adaware run it, fixed the problems. I ran spybot SD fixed some problems. THen I restarted. I then proceeded to install Windows SP2. I restarted. Everything went smooth. He had a weird issue I had never seen before. If you opened his E drive (cdrw drive) it had you know the whole "files waiting to be written to CD." Well somehow they added the windows folder to that. SO i tryed to remove it but you couldn't. There were so many files saying inuse or write protected. Well I deleted all but thoes. (remember these are temporary files not the actual windows folder???) So I went to safe mode and tryed to clean things up there and still it said some where being in use. So i decided not to bother with it. Restarted back to windows xp home reguarly. Insalled two things while running adaware again: WindowsFX (which I had never used before but had heard it was pretty cool.) and desktop X. I restarted the computer once they finished installing and now it gets to the screen blue "welcome" screen but instead it has the windows logo and just says windows XP home. It's not fully locking up because if i hit alt+tab I see two things one says windows xp logon and the other says the same when i toggle through them. I can't Ctrl+Alt+Del either... I tryed doing this in safemode, its the same problem. I trying going back to last known working config and it does the same thing.

So the only thing I could think to do was to go into recovery console (because the repair option isn't availible) and try to redo the bootini and maybe something got messed up there or even run a checkdisk. Well there is an administrator password set and he doesn't know it. I've tryed everything guys I'm desperate. Anything you guys could do to help me would be great. They have tons of stuff on this pc they need to save, about 18 gigs worth so I really don't want to reformat. I'm willing to do pretty much anything else if theres a way I can go around and back it all up then reformat. I dunno I just want it fixed.

Thanks Guys!

 

[Blitze105]

scary... ok well there are a few ways to get the password.. but most u usually need to atleast get to the desktop.. ill look it up and post back in a few minutes if i can find it.. i remember one where u didn't have to.. im not the best but i can prolly find the answer somewhere because i recall reading bout it a few times..

and.. u did try just hitting enter.. plz tell me u did

 

[SkyHi]

Okay, first off, I've had this same problem, with DesktopX. I installed and I had to run in safe mode and uninstall it becasue of my boot-screen change. Oh, try going into the Administrator in safe mode... no pass, I believe. So once you're in that, uninstall DirectX, and see what happens. If still the same problem, then go back to safe mode, and remove the other program. That SHOULD fix it, also make SURE that there is nothing changed with DesktopX with the boot, AT ALL. And I'm pretty sure it's impossible to have a password on Administrator in safe mode.

On another note:
So you can actually get to the login screen? If you can why can't you login?

"if i hit alt+tab I see two things one says windows xp logon"
You should be able to login and go to the command prompt and check some things there.. Post back once you try these things.

 

[vumpler]

Yes I tryed hitting enter lmao. And in safemode no I can't login. it goes to the same screen. I never even knew it went to a screen in safemode? It comes up the black screen saying build this and this service pack 2, but then it goes to that blue windows xp home screen. Sucks.

 

[vumpler]

I know what I can do though is take the HDD out and put it in another pc and fix whats on the drive from there... But how exactly would I remove all of the desktopx information along with the windowsfx or whatever? Because I can't exactly pick uninstall that way.. Should I just redo the boot.ini or osmething from there? What shoudl I do

 

[vumpler]

any ideas?

 

[vumpler]

Ok guys here is what I want to do i just don't know exactly how. See i made a restore point before all of this mess and what i want to do is to restore to it. Now i know how to text based do this in recovery console, but how can I do it using another computer and going in through the drive then? is there a way I can just rename the files and copy them over? How would I do this with a home version of XP OEM version. Here's the article I'm referencing.

How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting

I just remember this did fix my problem that I had before which stopped it from starting but the basis behind all of this is to go to a previous restore point. Can't I do this by navigating through from another PC when I put that hard drive in as a slave?

 

[vumpler]

bump :/

 

[vumpler]

anyone?

 

[Apokalipse]

I'd say DesktopX is your problem.
delete the desktopX program files from recovery console, or from another computer, then see if you can load windows
if you can login, to remove all of desktopX, reinstall it (and don't restart) then uninstall it

if you can't login after deleting the desktopX program files, do a repair of XP
at the first screen after loading from CD, press enter, there will be terms of agreement, then after that it will say "searching for previous versions of microsoft windows"
after it finishes, press r