All, I ran up my machine the other day and I got an error saying that the file ntoskrnl.exe was missing or had become corrupt. At first I looked at trying to install XP again but could not access the partition. So I ran the recovery disk I have with my Dell Dimension 2400 for XP Home SP1 and ran chkdsk. This seemed to rectify the problem of seeing the partition. I then posted a question to Dell and got an automated response that told me to expand the ntkrnlmp.ex_ to ntoskrnl.exe, but the expand did not work. So I copied the file ntoskrnl.exe from the recovery CD and also copied the file ntkrnlmp.ex_ to ntkrnlmp.exe. This got me further but then complained about ntfs.sys, so I copied this in as well. I eventually got the error message SESSION5_INITIALIZATION_FAILED, which I found out could be caused by the file ntdll.dll being too new for the version of XP Home on the machine, so I copied it from the d:\i386 directory on the recovery CD and this got me further to a new message saying there was a problem with C:\Windows\System32\Config\SOFTWARE; something to do with the registry and not being able to hive (file). I then read that you can solve this by copying the files DEFAULT, SAM, SECURITY, SOFTWARE and SYSTEM to .bak versions and then delete them and then copy the ones from the C:\WINDOWS\REPAIR directory. I did all this, but then I got a SESSION MANAGER INITIALIZATION failure message. I then read that this could be something to do with hotfixes and followed the instructions to uninstall recent fixes one at a time by running the command 'batch spuninst.txt' in each directory, until the PC could boot up. I did the first two hotfixes but I now get the message PROCESS1_INITIALIZATION_FAILED message that talks about looking at caching and shadowing, but I have not done anything with this yet as most of the talk seems to be about GoBack (Roxio). So that's where I am, and does anyone know what I can do to rectify this. Simes
