XP won't boot personal settings

After running my monthly maintenance program on my WINXP Pro system, it took a long time to reboot and I got a flash popup message saying Windows cannot load your personal settings and is loading default settings. It then proceeded to load only about half of my desktop icons but with NO TASKBAR. Rebooting to safe mode gave me the same icons and also a blank taskbar, but when I tried to run anything, I got a message that Windows Explorer had encountered a problem and was closing followed by a permanent hourglass cursor. I figured that this needed the Windows XP Repair activity, but when I tried to run my original Win XP Pro disc, I got a message that it was aborting because the program had changed ... presumably because SP2 had been loaded. So I tried running my SP2 slipstreamed disc, and it didn't offer the Repair option, but wanted to go directly into Install. My system is over 4-years old and has so many apps installed that a reinstall is not a viable option.

Looking in D&S, it appears that my personal settings are intact. Is this an MBR problem? What has to be done to get my normal boot running again?

 

Have you tried running system restore to a time before you had run your maintenance program?

 

Unfortunately, System Restore is one of the personal programs that won't run.