XP SP2 automatically logging out after login

[Kaervak]

Little background on the computer, back in May I removed the usual spyware/viruses deal. Patched to SP2 and updated everything else. Over the past few months an occassional virus/trojan/whatever would be caught by AVG/Spybot/MS and taken care of. The last month or so however the system has been restoring the registry or part of it upon boot up fairly regularly. And just recently when you login, it starts to load preferences & setting and then you are immediately logged back out. Does it for all user accounts, even with the administrator account in safe mode. Occassionally a pre safe mode startup screen shows up saying Windows was unable to completely load up and has been halted to prevent further damage. I tried running XP Setup to get to the recovery tools and it can't even run that. Crashed out just as setup was starting. I know the easiest way to fix this is reformat and reinstall, but I'd like to try and salvage the install. If you need any other information to try and figure out what's wrong with it, just let me know.

 

[Fokks]

You could try doing a repair install by booting off of your XP CD.

 

[Brazen]

There was virus out some time ago, a few years even I think, that caused behavior similar to this. I think it was sasser. You could try googling for how to remove sasser and see if that fixes your problem. Not too sure if that was the virus though, or even if your problem is a virus. sorry

 

[gsellis]

I would suspect that you have something other than Explorer as your shell. Either with Bart's PE or on and remotely check this key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell

If something else is in shell, changing it remotely may not help as there probably is an active infection, but it doesn't hurt to try. If Shutdown is your shell, I need to talk to you (our corp build automatically obsoletes itself based on date of install by replacing the shell with Shutdown set to logoff). :evil: