XP hangs at welcome screen

[LEXCERM]

Hi all,

A problem has arisen which I've never experienced before.

When logging in, the blue welcome screen appears, the hourglass flickers, and the PC freezes. It doesn't even take me to the login screen.

I've noticed that when hitting ALT TAB, I have two options: WINDOWS LOGON & LOG ONTO WINDOWS, but nothing happens. Tried booting in SAFE MODE, LAST CONFIGURED SETTINGS etc but to no avail. SAFE MODE brings up a black screen with a heading SERVICE PACK 2, but it then goes to the welcome screen again and it freezes.

When hitting F1 when re-booting, a message regarding the KEYBOARD appears vry briefly. I've swapped for another good keyboard, but to no avail.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[eyeball]

Boot off a live cd such as Bart PE or winternals ERD commander and scan your drive for viruses and malware accross the network if possible, or take the drive out and put it in another pc and scan it that way

[deiol]

Has anyone else come across this problem? LEXCERM, were you able to fix this? I have encountered a computer with the same problem, but every 'solution' seems to end in reformatting, which I am sure can be avoided. Its odd that you get two options under ALT+TAB, it seems like one may be a piece of poorly written malware trying to pose as the logon screen, just a thought, I'll try to grab a PE disk and check the startup items.

[kingsc]

Ew.

Well..... if you can get into a PE you could rebuild the registry from a restore point by copying the five hives from the RP to your original. I don't remember the procedure off the top of my head since I do it as a last resort before a complete re-image but I can probably dig it up if you need it.