XP Home working (?) but no desktop!

[Pat]

A friend has had his Packard Bell on the internet without a firewall or
antivirus protection!
It survived for a surprisingly long time!
Finally, he has had a long battle to clean it up. As he cannot find his
restore CD, I have not suggested that - it would have been the easiest thing
to do.
After a long battle, it now seems to be clean except that it boots to the
Packard Bell screen but does not show the desktop, Start button, task bar or
clock. Ctrl - ALT - Delete brings up the task manager, showing that he is
logged on, and we can run exolorer from there. Explorer shows the HDD
contents are still there.

Please, how do we persuade it to complete the boot to the desktop?

We have managed to create a new user account, with Admin priveleges, but
this behaves the same.

HELP!!

TIA

Pat

 

[GregRo]

A friend has had his Packard Bell on the internet without a firewall or
antivirus protection!
It survived for a surprisingly long time!
Finally, he has had a long battle to clean it up. As he cannot find his
restore CD, I have not suggested that - it would have been the easiest thing
to do.
After a long battle, it now seems to be clean except that it boots to the
Packard Bell screen but does not show the desktop, Start button, task bar or
clock. Ctrl - ALT - Delete brings up the task manager, showing that he is
logged on, and we can run exolorer from there. Explorer shows the HDD
contents are still there.

Please, how do we persuade it to complete the boot to the desktop?

We have managed to create a new user account, with Admin priveleges, but
this behaves the same.

HELP!!

TIA

Pat

This may or may not work.
Boot to safe mode F8 twice.
Look for a folder call i386
Type foldername\I386\WINNT32.EXE
Do a repair install
Use the key on the machine.
Don't activate.
Clean up the spyware and adaware if you can.
Then if success then activate it.



Greg RO

 

[Pat]

Thank you!!
It was nowhere as straightforward as it should have been, but you put me on
the right track.
I eventually got the thing to re-install itself from a hidden partition.
Seems to be working OK now except for a '... Has recovered from a serious
error ... etc' message that comes up every time I start or re-start.
Just have to put up with this, I guess.

Now to copy back his files from my externalhard drive ......

Thank you, very much!
Pat

 

[GregRo]

Thank you!!
It was nowhere as straightforward as it should have been, but you put me on
the right track.
I eventually got the thing to re-install itself from a hidden partition.
Seems to be working OK now except for a '... Has recovered from a serious
error ... etc' message that comes up every time I start or re-start.
Just have to put up with this, I guess.

You can try this if you have xp service pack two installed.
This may or may not work.

In the boot.ini file try changing

/fastdetect /something=something
to
/fastdetect /NoExecute=AlwaysOff

This disables dep. Some computers can not handle dep.



Greg Ro