XP startup problem- stops on desktop without icons or taskbar

  • Thread starter Thread starter dancingphil
  • Start date Start date
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dancingphil

Hi there,

I did a system restore today to a point about a week ago-
for some reason Windows periodically refuses to recognise
my CDRW drive and relegates it to a CD-ROM, which only a
System Restore seems to fix. This has worked without
problems before, and my PC has been fine for the last few
times I have used it since the S-Restore.

Just now, though, it said on booting up- in a dialog box
at the 'welcome' screen- "Part of your registry had to be
recovered from a log. This has been done successfully" (to
paraphrase). But then the desktop background appeared with
the mouse pointer- and that's it. No icons, no taskbar.
Just background picture and pointer. If I press Ctrl-Alt-
Del, the Task Manager appears with a bunch of Processes,
no tasks. Nothing else is there. What's going on?? However
many times I restart, it comes to the same point and
nothing more happens (the dialog box only appeared the
first two times).

Sorry for the long explanation. If anyone can help, I'd
really appreciate it.

dancingphil
 
I did a system restore today to a point about a week ago-
for some reason Windows periodically refuses to recognise
my CDRW drive and relegates it to a CD-ROM, which only a
System Restore seems to fix. This has worked without
problems before, and my PC has been fine for the last few
times I have used it since the S-Restore.

Just now, though, it said on booting up- in a dialog box
at the 'welcome' screen- "Part of your registry had to be
recovered from a log. This has been done successfully" (to
paraphrase). But then the desktop background appeared with
the mouse pointer- and that's it. No icons, no taskbar.
Just background picture and pointer. If I press Ctrl-Alt-
Del, the Task Manager appears with a bunch of Processes,
no tasks. Nothing else is there. What's going on?? However
many times I restart, it comes to the same point and
nothing more happens (the dialog box only appeared the
first two times).
Click to expand...

dancingphil,

one way to go about things would be a repair installation,
provided you have a full not just OEM, Windows XP installation
CD.

Boot from the CD and first select to install Windows XP. Then it
should show you your current installation and offer to do a
repair installation on it. This should keep all your installed
software and settings and, of course, your data.

There is always a risk, so take the normal precautions like
doing a fresh backup first.

After everything is fine again, install Service Pack 2.

Hans-Georg
 
see my recent e-mails on problems with XP SP2, it's that some services
aren't starting (on the task manager you'll see only processes, but no users
in the "users" pane, nor any users mentioned as owners for the processes,
only one or two procs will show "SYSTEM" in the user column)

you have to use "File/New Task (Run)..." from the task manager and run
regedit, then follow info I had at my other e-mail

copying below for your convenience:

In my system I found out the XPSP2 setup had failed to compete:

it was installing a service to finish up stuff after reboot, but that
service (and many others on the PC) was dependent on RPCSS service which was
failing to start cause the XPSP2 had changed the user account for that
service to "NetworkService" (it had also changed some other services to
"LocalService" and they were failing to start too) from "LocalSystem". In
some of those service account change cases it had "NT AUTHORITY\" prefix
there, that one doesn't seem to be the problem though

the problem was it hadn't created those accounts! only solution was to fix
them to use "LocalSystem" again (obviously they wanted to make those
accounts with lower priviledges, but didn't know what priviledges to give to
such accounts, what group to put them into etc., plus since RPCSS wasn't
working the MMC properties dialog didn't show up and various other ugly
behaviour - luckily "regedit" worked)

so using "regedit" or "regedt32" (prefer the 1st) I had to go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

and search for all services that had the value "ObjectName" set to anything
else than "LocalSystem", esp. "NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService" or
"LocalService" and changed them to "LocalSystem" and then those services
were starting OK again and the system started functioning OK. First do this
to "rpcss" service, since it's critical for many other services to load too
 
see "XP SP2 Network Connections gone" thread for additional info on this
(the problem was caused originally by too restrictive file/folder
permissions and XP SP2 setup failing to set proper permissions for
NetworkService and LocalService accounts before trying to reboot the system
to finish the last bits of installation at reboot [rpcss service wasn't
coming up at reboot cause networkservice account didn't have enough access
rights to system folders])
 
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