Sticky Situation

I come home today and my wife says the computer is messed up. I take a look and notice that my start menu bar is completely black. I right click to properties to change the theme or something and it's all black. I can't see words on my menus. I switch from admistrator to my own personal account and everything is fine. I don't know if I have access to administrator control panel or not. I then figure if I just reinstall Windows XP Pro it should just fix it. So I did. No fix. I am in your guy's hands. Help me out!
Thanks!

 

Do you have any new hardware installed? Got a Logitech webcam?

 

No new hardware has been installed. Is there any way to access Administrator through my other personal account? Is there some kind of button mishap that may have happen that changed this look. My screen is fine when I'm in my or my wife's account but in Administrator it's completely changed with no way of reading my menus.
Any help would be appreciated.

 

Does this also happen in safe mode?

If you create a new account with Administrator privileges does it happen there?

I presume your admin account is not named 'administrator' ?

 

You may be able to access those administrator settings while in safe mode.

 

I tried safe mode and the WHOLE screen is black. Can't see a thing. I'm really at a loss. Any suggestions would be really helpful.
Thanks

 

My administrator account is actually named "administrator". (I'm not very creative)

 

Windows XP has a reserved administrator account called administrator that is only accessible in safe mode.

For this reason you are not supposed to call any other account 'administrator', and I had thought that windows would not actually let you create such an acount - It has certainly refused me in the past.

Please confirm a few more facts.

How did you try to get to safe mode?
What exactly happened?
What do you mean by 'I did a reinstall of Windows XP' ? Are we now working on a clean installation? or did you try a repair installation or what?

 

I got into safe mode by pressing F8 while booting up.
When safe mode loaded up the screen was completely black with white font in each corner saying "safe mode".
Yes, I did a repair installation. (sorry, I wasn't specific) I've never done a full reinstall before. I wonder if that'll fix the problem. (by the way, this isn't a major problem. I am still able to use my wife's or my account with no glitches whatsoever. Everything looks fine on those accounts. It's just the "Administrator" account that makes it difficult to get around in.)
Thanks.

 

These two statements are very different. Attention to detail is very important in computing.

In fact I think your pc simply hadn't finished booting to safe mode. Booting to safe mode can take a very long time especially with an ailing pc. You may have to wait more than 2 hours (yes) for the boot process to finish - I usually leave them overnight in these circumstances and only declare 'boot incomplete' in the morning.

If you do manage to get safe mode or you administrator account in normal mode to boot.

Tap the windows key once. This will bring up the start menu and allow you access to the control panel.

Go into users and create a new administrator acount with a name that is not administrator.

Boot to this accouint in normal mode and use it to delete the offending 'administrator' account. This will not delete the underlying safe mode administrator account.