WinXP Home boot issue

Hi, all! Running XP/Home, revision level unknown.

When booting up, all appears fine, until the desktop wallpaper is drawn. At that point everything stops. No errors, no icons, nothing. Pressing Ctl-Alt-Del brings up task mgr, but nothing innocuous is running.

Booted into Safe Mode; same happens with either Administrator or user account. Background is drawn, then nothing.

Safe Mode with command prompt works fine as well, but upon exiting the command prompt background draws but nothing else happens.

Suggestions?
Steve

 

what happens if, when you press ctrl+alt+del, you go to File --> New task --> type (without the quotes) "explorer.exe"

 

Nothing: CPU usage jumps momentarily, then nothing.

Also manually ran msconfig.exe, selected Selective Startup, and still nothing; also tried variants of shutting off all or certain services and startup stuffs, no go.

 

Can you perform a system restore? In these situations I would try that or reinstallingor running the repair options using my XP CD. I've reinstalled before without formating the hard drive and I did not lose my files. They were simply in a different folder.

 

Restoring/reinstalling isn't an option (user doesn't have a clue how to reinstall apps after reinstalling Windows), and the user didn't bring in her Home CD. I'm surrounded by XP Pro CDs, but not a single Home CD!

 

I see

 

Is this a machine you are fixing for someone? What happened, did it have spyware?

Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up Task Manager. And click File, New Task (Run..) and enter regedit and click OK. This will run the registry editor. Now look for the below registry keys (navigate thru the registry). Make sure you only look for these exact keys listed below and let us know if they are present.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\explorer.exe

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\iexplorer.exe

Steve

 

I have to get off awhile. If you locate those exact keys you need to delete (remove) them and the desktop should return.

Be sure it is those exact keys.

Steve

 

No, those keys don't exist.

The machine has been scanned for nasties (SpyBot) and viruses; nothing found.