Safe mode will not start

[Idontwantspam]

This is perhaps the weirdest thing I've ever seen. There's a Dell Desktop with WinXP Home SP2 that I use occasionally that WILL NOT start in Safe Mode if I don't first turn on the Welcome screen. I prefer the Classic Logon pompt, the one that looks like Win2K, so I turned off the Welcome screen, but one day I went to boot into Safe Mode, and it got as far as "Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to log on to Windows" and the whole thing froze. The mouse would not BUDGE, the keyboard wouldn't register ANYTHING AT ALL. I went back and tried again, this time with the Welcome screen on. I clicked on my (Administrative) username/picture and the whole thing froze again. Mouse wouldn't move, keyboard wouldn't respond, I had to press and hold the power button to turn it off. Then I went back and removed my password and tried to log on (with the welcome screen on). It finally worked. Any clue why this was happening? It seems to me that if safe mode is needed to repair the system sometimes if you can't use normal mode, it's pretty bad for Safe Mode to not work without using regular mode to make it work. How can I maybe fix this?

Edited March 27, 2007 by Idontwantspam