XP home taking 20 minutes to start

[Lorne]

Yesterday my computer would not boot - the error message "procedure entry
point could not be located in msvcrt.dll" came up for both services.exe and
lsass.exe during boot. In the end I ran repair from the install disk. It
appeared to be fine after that but when I rebooted it took 3 minutes to get
to the screen with login names, then 5 minutes to get to a grey screen with
the office tool bar along the top (but unable to open any software) and then
another 15 minutes to display my desktop at which point various software
opened that I had been pressing from the office toolbar.

When finally started there is no task bar & no start menu. The windows key
+ E opens explorer but on its own does not open the menu. There are no
printers installed anymore & when I press add printer it says process can't
start. I do get internet access though. After boot there are 4 copies of
svchost.exe running & 3 copies of explorer.exe - is that normal? I have
some javascript code displaying a clock on the desktop - it takes 10 minutes
after the desktop displays before the clock shows up.

I can start most software from explorer, but it is a big pain & I need to
get the start menu back and get the thing to boot in a reasonable time. I
have reinstalled 3 times with the same results. It may or may not be
relevant but I uninstalled McAfee privacy service just before this happened.

Anybody got any ideas what is wrong or what I can do?

If I reinstall from scratch rather than repair does it overwrite files in
Documents and settings? and can I preserve my software settings (the option
to preserve software only seems to have the option of copying from one
computer to another & I do not want to spend a whole week setting this thing
up).

Thanks in advance if anybody can save me the problem of a complete reinstall
or tell me how to do it without having to reinstall all my software again.

 

[Lorne]

I forgot to add that the repair option to reinstall XP home overwrites all
the historic system restore points so I can't get back to a working
version - can somebody at microsoft look into why this happens. If somebody
runs repair they have a problem. If they have a problem why delete older
working system setups that may help them?

 

[Jerry]

Sorry I can't help you much with the base problem. I've
run into similar wierd and wonderful XP issues and found
that repair doesn't seem to work very well after having
used it on several of my customer's machines. As far as
saving your data, when you reinstall XP into the same
\windows directory, it warns you that it is going to blow
away your settings, my documents, etc, but the wierd
thing is that it will blow away some but not all, at
least if you have your Outlook .pst files in \my docs. I
don't take the chance - I pull the hard drive and put it
in another machine and copy the data off. You can use the
same process to copy it back after reinstalling.

Did you happen to try system restore before reinstalling?
It might be too late now, but that has save my bacon a
few times. If only Win2k Prof had sys restore, we'd be
selling that instead of XP.