Your user account is corrupted. Without the *exact* wording of the error
message, I can't be sure but an inpage error is often caused by failing
hardware. Certainly if your hard drive or RAM is failing, that would cause
corruption of the operating system. I'll give you some suggestions but you
know your own skill level best. Perhaps you would be better off taking the
machine to a competent local computer tech (not a
BigComputerStore/GeekSquad type of place). Your choice.
1. Log into the built-in Administrator account. In XP Home, boot the
computer into Safe Mode. Do this by repeatedly tapping the F8 key as the
computer is starting up. This will get you to the right menu. Navigate
using your Up arrow key; the mouse will not work here. Once in Safe Mode,
you will see the normally hidden Administrator account. The default
password is a blank.
In XP Pro, you do not need to go into Safe Mode. At the Welcome Screen, do
Ctrl-Alt-Del twice to get the classic Windows logon box. Type in
"Administrator" and whatever password you assigned when you set up Windows.
2. If you can successfully log into Administrator, back up the data from
your user account to an external hard drive or USB thumb drive immediately.
Do this by navigating to C:\Documents and Settings\Your-User-Account and
the various directories - My Documents, Desktop, Favorites, Bookmarks if
you use Firefox, email, etc.
3. If you can't successfully log into Administrator, pull the hard drive and
put it in an external drive enclosure or use an adapter to attach the drive
to a working computer. Copy off the data that way. If you can't mount the
drive, the drive has probably died. At this point it would be good to runa
diagnostic utility on the drive, too. If the drive is OK, move on to the
next step. If it isn't OK, you're looking at sending it to a professional
data recovery company like Drive Savers (
www.drivesavers.com). This is
fairly expensive.
4. If the hard drive is good, put it back in the original machine. Now doa
RAM test. I like Memtest86+ fromwww.memtest.org. There is no point in
continuing with software repairs (Windows) if the hardware is bad.
5. If all the hardware is good, create a new user account for yourself and
log into it once to create the profile files/folders. Then log back into
Administrator and copy your data to the new user account. I don't like to
copy settings from a corrupted account to a new one. After you log into the
new account and are sure all your stuff is there, you can delete the
corrupted account.
6. If all that worked, make sure the computer is virus/malware-free because
sometimes malware can cause system corruption too.
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Removing_Malware
Malke
