After scan, XP boots to blank screen.

[gamble629]

Recently I was asked to clean up a computer for a friend. The computer was barely running when I downloaded Spybot.

So I ran Spybot and there were a ton of problems (unfortunately I don't have the list because it's on the computer I can't get to). When it went to fix them the computer froze and I restarted it. Then it started scanning again and it fixed all of the problems except one.

The problem is though that when the computer restarted Windows XP has a blank screen with just the background

Sorry for the vague information but I'm kind of desperate for information seeing is that is not my computer.

2 things I am going to try when I go to the computer again are booting in safe mode and seeing what I can do in there or seeing if I can find a Windows disk and trying to use the repair function.


Any information would be appreciated..

[Yodama]

hello,

well I can just guess but you may also try this on a Windows XP (should also work on a Windows 2k):

on the blank screen, call the taskmanager with ctrl+alt+del
check if the explorer.exe is running
if not, select "File - new task" and enter regedit.exe
now naviagate to \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
check on the right pane if the value "Shell" has the Data "explorer.exe"
if this is not the case, correct this by double clicking "Shell" and entering "explorer.exe"
on the next reboot the desktop should load


as you can see with the "if"s this is a guess, if it does not fit to the situation we can at least exclude one cause.

[gamble629]

Thanks for that info, I'll be able to check to see if it works out in a few hours.

Is there any other info I should get when I go over to mess with his computer?

I'll edit this post with the results in a few hours..