Paperweight or doorstop?

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Aardvark2012

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I'm using XP with SP2, and things have gone very strange. I have no idea what's causing this, and neither does anyone else I've asked about it. *Any* suggestions would be highly appreciated. The problems are:

- When I boot up (normally and in safe mode) there is no taskbar.

- I can't copy/paste anything (normally and in safe mode).

- When I boot up normally it tells me that it couldn't start my anti-virus software (McAfee) saying that I may be low on memory.

- I can't start most applications (I click, but nothing happens), even when I've turned off all the non-vital processes.

- I've tried booting from a floppy (boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr -- which I believe are the right files), but I just get the "non-system disk" error.

- I have no viruses or spyware (according to Ad-aware, Trend online scan and SpyBot).

Can anyone tell me what's going on? Would reinstalling Windows help? Formatting the hard drive? Am I the proud owner of a doorstop? Please help!
 
Reinstalling windows and formatting the hard drive would help. Your problem is fixable, but it is much simplier to reinstall XP.
 
have you tried to find the taskbar? IE, press the windows ke on your keyboard, or press CTRL + ESC to get the start menu to come up? once it's up, right click it and see what options are listed. Another option would be to check and see if the problem is in every profile or just yours. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL 2x and that will give you the true local admin account to login with. That will shoe you if it's a profile problem or just a system issue. if it turns out to be a profile thing, rename your folder name from documents and settings and login again. That should recreate your profile. Good luck...
 
Thanks DJ-Chris. Two questions though (please bear in mind that I'm generally pretty clueless about all this):

1) Doesn't the fact that I can't boot off a floppy imply that the problem is somehow "underneath" the operating system?

2) Are you familiar with this type of problem? Could you give me at least some vague idea of what you think it might be? How would I go about fixing it without reinstalling Windows and everything else?

Thanks so much for your time
 
Inaris --

I've tried many things to find my task bar, and nothing brings up the start menu. I could get the taskbar properties though. Nothing weird looking there -- it's not locked, and I can even get the resize arrow mouse pointer. But it still won't let me resize. I've tried logging in as the administrator in safe mode, but everything's the same there too. Thanks anyway.
 
did you by chance install/uninstall some skinning program to skin your windows desk top.....cuz it sure sounds like your XP shell is destroyed
 
Aardvark2012 said:
Inaris --

I've tried many things to find my task bar, and nothing brings up the start menu. I could get the taskbar properties though. Nothing weird looking there -- it's not locked, and I can even get the resize arrow mouse pointer. But it still won't let me resize. I've tried logging in as the administrator in safe mode, but everything's the same there too. Thanks anyway.

Floppy problem could easily be unrelated
 
Jaksback: I don't think so.... what's a "skinning program"? The only thing that's been installed recently was a Movielink update -- which actually caused a few problemsl. I've tried uninstalling it, but the uninstaller keeps getting fatal errors.

DJ-Chris: Good point... but I guess that would mean my computer's falling apart on two fronts. My floppy drive seems to work normally the rest of the time. Any idea what the problem there could be?

Thanks for all your comments.
 
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