xp incomplete boot

XP Home

Explorer locked up while surfing.

On reboot the system went to a black screen with cursor. No icons, task bar etc. No Error messages.

Last known good brought up the dextop picture but did not go any further with regard to configuring the desktop. It just replaced the black screen with the desktop background picture we had been using.

CTRL Alt Del brings up the options screen for logon or out etc. Task Magager was available and I was able to run some of the programs. "spybot " for instance. It worked fine. I could even browse around using the File>Run option

I could not find away to run RESTORE. Its not my computer so I do not know if RESTORE was even turned on.

will the "repair" from an XP disk help?

We could move the disk to another computer to harvest its data prior to a reinstall if it comes to that.

Chkdsk was run at startup once.. no errors were found.

E-2 need higer level help here.
DC