Windows XP Pro freezes

[davelew]

Hello everyone,

Windows is freezing shortly after booting up.

Here's a little history.

I see the popups about IE8. I call AT&T and they walked me thru to downloading it from their web site. I use it a few times a couple of days later and it closes itself after about 30 seconds. Same happens when I was using Firefox. I call them up again and they said IE8 is not compatible with XP. So they had me uninstall IE8. But Firefox and IE7 would still close on its own. So the guy walks me thru to do a system restore. Tried a bunch of dates but still did not complete the restore. The guy tells me how to get into SafeMode and we try a few date without any success. The he left me with trying more dates and then trying it with my Norton Anti-Virus turned off. I never get to Norton and then Windows would not start up.

Next day, I follow the procedure outlined in microsoft 307545, recovering when Windows XP would not start. This took me hours as I'm not that hip to the computer stuff. I was having trouble getting into SafeMode and the RecoveryConsole. But I finished everything except the system restore. I was able to try one restore point but the restore was incomplete.

Now my Windows freezes after I restart. I can see the desktop with all the icons, but the names under each icon are highlighted. I cannot open any of the icons. Sometimes I can go to Start, then Settings, but then Windows freeze. Same when I go to Programs. I was able to run 'sol' a few times.

The hourglass is running and I can move the mouse around. I can sometimes close the warnings: Application failed to initialized: 0x800106ba... or ZoneAlarm Client has encountered a problem and needs to close.

I need to hit the little restart button on the front of the PC to restart. If I don't do anything else after restarting and go to Start, I can choose ShutDown or Restart and it does it. Ctrl-alt-delete does not work.

My system is a Pentium 4 with 512 RAM that I purchased from someone who built it. There is a 2nd HD with all my pix that I had unplugged with the PC off before starting the Windows recovery.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks