Windows XP Professional Won't load On Laptop - Logging on Issues

I have a Dell Latitude D620 laptop (2006) that I’ve owned for about 3 years with very minimal issues. A few days ago, I noticed that I was beginning to run out of some hard drive space and wanted to back up the data and music on an external hard drive and remove excess clutter from the laptop to free up space.

Before I could do this I had to run out of the house and I logged off and powered down the laptop. When I returned, I first plugged in the external hard drive and then I turned the laptop on. I haven’t been able to get on the computer since. It won't let me logon to Windows XP Professional.

I’m able to type in my password and it begins to load up Windows (loading your personal settings). But then, within seconds, the laptop’s wallpaper flashes for about a second and then the screen reads (saving your personal settings) before logging me off again where I have to re-enter my password again.

I realized right away that I probably shouldn’t have plugged in the external hard drive BEFORE powering up the laptop (I'm speculating that this may have caused this issue because that was the last thing I did) , but I haven’t been able to fix the problem.

I went into my BIOS and noticed that the boot up order was out of sync. The internal hard drive was at #2, with something that I believed read “*--* disk” as #1 (probably the external hard drive but I forget what it was called exactly. I just know that I didn't recognize it)

I’ve placed the boot order back in it’s proper order with the internal hdd as #1but the problem keeps on happening. After the first time, I unplugged the external hard drive right away so it hasn’t been plugged into the laptop since the first time the problem occurred. I attempted to logon to the laptop by going into safe mode and the same thing happens. When I try to logon in safe mode as both my name or the administrator, it begins to log me off again.

What am I not doing or what am I doing wrong? Any assistance would be useful. Many thanks!

 

I pressed F8 as the system was coming on and took it into Safe Mode and highlighted and selected last known good configuration. But the problem did not go away. I tried it a second time and still the system began logging me off again.

 

The information found in that link was good, but my problem was still there. I was able to log in with my password while in Safe Mode, and it appeared as though it was going to let me on and then it indicated that it was saving my settings and logging me off again.

Someone suggested the Dell Latitude drivers and diagnostics disc and run it at repair mode. Would that be a good idea to try this method? I'm willing to lose the info on that laptop as I found out that I've got 85% of it saved already from a previous backup if I were to run the repair disc.

 

Luke,
I just had this problem recently with another PC... I found that the userinit.exe file was missing out of the windows/system32 folder. I had to copy it back in using the command prompt via recovery console. This may be a bit more drastic then your case, but if you can get into the command prompt via recovery console you could at least see if the file is there?

VT...