WinXP Hangs after Login

[Guest]

HELP!! My PC will not get any further than allowing me to put in my
password. It was acting strange on my domain and my profile was messed up.
I removed it form the domain to recreate the profile, but now after putting
in my password in the local profile, it never logs in - it hangs on the blue
screen that you see right before your desktop comes up. It happens in
regular mode and in both Safe Mode with/without Networking. I can hit a
CTRL+ALT+DEL and get to the Task Manager, but when I go to File>New Task and
choose something like 'cmd' or even 'regedit', I get an eror saying that
"..there is no program associtaed with that file type. Go to
'Options.....blah, blah' and choose a new association', or somethingto this
effect. I can get to Safe Mode Command Prompt and can browse my drives, but
I can't run anything.

The other strange thing is if I reboot, let it get up to the login screen
but don't log in, I can see the drives from my server and other PC's on the
network like nothing is wrong.

How can I fix this without formatting or reloading WinXP?

 

[Ted]

It seems that the .exe association got corrupted
or miss-handled.
The only fix would be if you can restore from
windows system restore.

 

[Guest]

Tried System estore, both from regular mode (when I was able to), as well as
Safe Mode. I received an error that said 'Your PC could not be restored to
it's previous settings' or something similar to that. It also isn't just
..exe extensions that are corrupted - it is .txt, .bat, and everything else I
tried to open.

Thanks for the help though, but I'll need to keep trying..

 

[Ted]

I never used system restore, I believe you can run
it when booting, press the F12 when the boot menu
first appears.