sp 2 causing crash?

[imported_joetech]

My daughter 's laptop wasn't working for her at school. I brought it home and got it to work without much of a problem. I told her how to upgrade for XP pro and install SP 2 but she never did it. I did an adware scan and found a ton of junk and got rid of that. I then went to the MS website to download the updates. It did a scan and installed sp1 only. I then went back to install sp2, which took forever. It finally downloaded everything and started to do the sp2 install and about half way through just stopped completely. I restarted and it wantd to do a recovery. I have the original XP pro setup CD so I tried to do a recovery with that. OK fine but it wanted the administrators password which I know, or thought I did. When I entered it it won't take it. Is it the same password she uses to bootup? Or is it the Keycode from the original XP setup CD? I have both. At one point it prompted me to put in the recovery disk in the A: drive but this laptop doesn't have one. She has an external drive back as school. Can I make another recovery disk from my XP computer and use it in hers?
If I do a re-install of XP would I loose all of her files and programs?
Does anyone have any idea why this would crash? I've updated several computers including mine from th MS website to SP 2 without any problems.

 

[Doh!]

The administrator password is the one you've setup during the install process. Maybe same as the user logon password if that's what you've used.
I would suggest doing the repair installation of XP (basically re-installs all windows files ) & you won't lose your data or programs.
I would guess the installation failed because of too much junk/nasty files in the windows to begin with plus user errors. It may also indicate hardware incompatibilities or it could be simply unstable.

 

[mechBgon]

Try a blank Administrator password. The account she logs on with is probably not the actual Administrator account, you normally do not ever see it.

Bigger picture: If it was running around without even SP1 installed, then did you scan for viruses first, using a current-generation antivirus software? If you didn't use the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta software, try it out too. Also, it might be a good idea to install SP2 in Safe Mode next time.

Other resources:

[*]Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer
[*]Netgear RP614 (not software, but $40 well spent to provide a non-subvertible firewall)
[*]Kaspersky Antivirus Personal 5 trialware Because of the hourly updates and strong detection, this is what I would get if it were my kid.
[*]Norton Antivirus 2005 trialware
[*]McAfee VirusScan 9.0 trialware
[*]WinSockFix for in case you can't browse the Internet after tearing out the malware
[*]F-Secure BlackLight rootkit detector

Good luck