One of the techs I work with has done this. He says he had a usb port on his
xp embdedded device so he put a usb cdrom drive on the unit and booted a
linux CD then he changed the shell by editing the .ini files. You can find
how to change the shell this by reading documentation about windows xp
products on Microsoft's site. Once you correct the shell you can boot
normally, login and work. However he said he had to enable cetain options in
the security policy as well. Some of that might be possible from remotely
manageing the device if it is part of a domain but he did it locally by using
mmc. He set the EFS policy there. When he was done, he reset the shell.
Depends on your interface but you could also set the shell to load another
way that simplifies management tasks. He said if you can edit the ini but
the correct shell file is not loaded on the device, you can take it from the
developers kit or maybe standard xp and decompress the file to the correct
location.
