I seem to be going in an infinate loop . . .
While helping a friend delouse his system, and in the process of removing a page and a half of spyware and viruses in Safe Mode, we seem to have removed something critical. When we tried to reboot to normal mode to see if it was more stable, it gets to the LogIn screen, and when you select a user it says it is loading settings, then it flashes their desktop wallpaper for a second, then says Logging Off . . . and sure enough, that's what it does.
I couldn't see any way around this, so I stuck his XP Home CD in the drive and preceded to do a Repair Reinstall.
It gets as far as the fourteen minute mark, where it stalls for a bit and then says it is low in memory and needs to increase the Swap File. After clicking on OK, it thinks about it for another little bit and then works its way down to the nine minute mark where it says it is saving system settings, and there it sits.
I have allowed it to sit as long as 45 minutes and it doesn't go any further. The HDD light is on and flickering, but it will not complete from this point. If I shut it off and then turn it back on (cold boot), then it jumps back in the middle of the installation process and goes as far as the nine minute mark and quits.
Anybody have a clue how I can get out of this mess, short of a format/clean install. He has a ton of unbackedup data in his My Documents folder, so this is not a really good option.
While helping a friend delouse his system, and in the process of removing a page and a half of spyware and viruses in Safe Mode, we seem to have removed something critical. When we tried to reboot to normal mode to see if it was more stable, it gets to the LogIn screen, and when you select a user it says it is loading settings, then it flashes their desktop wallpaper for a second, then says Logging Off . . . and sure enough, that's what it does.
I couldn't see any way around this, so I stuck his XP Home CD in the drive and preceded to do a Repair Reinstall.
It gets as far as the fourteen minute mark, where it stalls for a bit and then says it is low in memory and needs to increase the Swap File. After clicking on OK, it thinks about it for another little bit and then works its way down to the nine minute mark where it says it is saving system settings, and there it sits.
I have allowed it to sit as long as 45 minutes and it doesn't go any further. The HDD light is on and flickering, but it will not complete from this point. If I shut it off and then turn it back on (cold boot), then it jumps back in the middle of the installation process and goes as far as the nine minute mark and quits.
Anybody have a clue how I can get out of this mess, short of a format/clean install. He has a ton of unbackedup data in his My Documents folder, so this is not a really good option.
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