XP doesn't boot to welcome screen

[dextrous]

Okay, I'm working on a machine that had a corrupt registry so I restored a woeking registry from the 28th. After I did that the machine booted to XP but it would routinely lock up after a few minutes of use. So I used system restore to restore the system to the 16th (newest restore point besides the 28th). That didn't fix the locking up problem (the PSU was the culprit) so after I fixed that, I fired up system restore again and restored the system to the 28th again.

Now, after I did that, when XP boots, it will only boot up to the right before the welcome screen where you can logon. The machine does not freeze as the mouse still works but windows is useless. It does this in safe mode as well. I read some places on the internet that it could be a dialog box thats popping up with an error but you just can't see it behind the pre-welcome screen stuff. If I hit alt+f4 to close anything behind the screen it locks up. Any ideas on how to fix short of a repair?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Did you try alt-tab? Or ctrl-alt-del? Or Esc?

Safe-mode shouldn't allow anything to actually be running on the system when it reaches the desktop, so the dialog box would have to be an error of some sort, most likely due to the repeated registry restorations. I'd say it's odd that an error message would appear before the logon screen is available, since you can't DO anything about an error until you're logged on. That's pretty much the first thing that has to happen, and if it's not available, then there probably isn't anything that you can do.

You might try using the repair console to disable all the services. Or remove all expansion cards, and disable all on-chip hardware like LAN and sound.

 

[clarkmo]

The point where you are freezing is where I usually lock up when overclocking. Do you have the right voltage set for the cpu and memory?