BSOD c000021a I feel like I've searched forever!

Hi there. I hope someone can help me. My boyfriend's inspiron 6000 (xp) started acting up a couple days ago. I was nervous to restart, so I ran AVG, ccleaner...AVG came up with nothing, and I fixed two issues with ccleaner. When I restarted,I got the following:

STOP: C000021A FATAL SYSTEM ERROR the session manager initialization process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc000026c (0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down.

So Ive looked and looked, but everything I try does not help. I can not access safe mode or last known good configuration. I ran chkdsk /r and it said it found and fixed one or more errors, but it didn't help. I can attempt to load normally and in safe mode but the pc just hangs at the welcome screen. I was even going to try to do a repair install, but after agreeing to the terms, while Windows is searching for a previous version, again it just hangs there. I was hoping to not have to format it but I am really at a loss. I tried to uninstall certain updates that other people had found as their solution, but I dont even have them installed! Anyone have any suggestions?

Thank-you...
Valerie

 

Easy stuff first..
Disconnect any peripherals you don't need, such as USBs, external monitor, printer, etc.
Unplug the power supply, remove the battery and hold the on button for 30 seconds. Reconnect power and see if anything improves.

BTW What was it doing when it started acting up?
What Service Pack do you have?
Did you add any stuff (software or hardware) just before things went wrong, or download updates?

 

Thank you so much for a response! I am at work right now but when I get home to the laptop I will try your suggestions.

I was under the impression that my boyfriend had been surfing some sites and got some sort of virus; the sound driver among several other drivers had become uninstalled. (network, conextant, cd/dvd, maybe more but I am having trouble remembering.) So I attempted to reinstall the missing drivers and I restarted the computer. I looked to see if the drivers were there, and they were gone, again, after the restart.

I know this probably sounds naive but I actually don't know what service pack I have, can you recommend a way for me to figure that out? I am sorry for my ignorance!

I did not however install any updates, I am certain of that. A different site recommended that I go into dir $* and look for a bad file on the date of the error, but I never found anything from that date. Is it possible I messed something up further by reinstalling the drivers?

Thanks so much, again...

 

Hmmm... not sure how to find service pack if the computer won't boot. Perhaps someone else can jump in on that.
The computer might have some automatic updates happening - not unusual for Windows updates and virus protection software updates, etc.
It's always possible to mess things up installing drivers, but there are other explanations - particularly if there have been viruses on the computer.
You said there was a virus that removed drivers, so you reinstalled and rebooted. Did you get rid of the virus(es) first? If not, it is highly likely that that is the problem.

 

I tried removing the battery but unfortunately it was of no help.

I presume I did not remove whatever infection that was there since AVG did not come up with anything before I rebooted. I feel so frustrated I'm about to format the thing to get it off my mind.

Do you think there is a better anti virus I should be running? I really appreciate your advice. Thank you

 

AVG has a good reputation. No virus protection is perfect, especially if you're not too careful about the sites you visit.
If you do decide to reformat, you can probably get wanted things off the disk before doing so by connecting the disk to another computer as slave. Otherwise you will lose those things, unless the disk was partitioned.
There may be other options to reformatting though. I haven't had time to look into this properly yet - perhaps someone else will have an idea.
BTW, if you do happen to get back in at all, and it still isn't right, you might try going back to a System Restore point, to before the problems started..
Try Safe Mode again, as things might have cleared up enough for that to work.