I will try the Linux Live CD. I assume it lets me browse my hard drive without the
Windows permissions baggage.
Being that it tried to repair a registry coruption, that’s likely to have hosed the system.
OP checking in. Go onto the hardrive (using WIndows repair :smack: )
The bootlog stops at mouhid.sys (last thing in log).
I don’t know where to go after this.
Interesting tidbit. When I tried to do the remote login stuff / map drives the administrator account and password were rejected.
However, windows repair (which requires the admin account and password) cheerfully accepted it. So, the account was not destroyed as I surmised.
What is the status of this now? Too bad I didn’t see this earlier, we had the same exact problem on a couple of PCs at work. They were personal employee machines brought in from home for us to fix. Employees get their machines full of viruses and spyware and since we are technical they beg us for help.
The problem was spyware believe it or not. We ran spybot, hijack this, and probably something else on the machines and next thing we know we have the same exact problem you encountered. No logins! We were able to find others complaining of the same issue on the web so I know it was not unique to us. We tried a lot of things but I forgot exactly what worked. I can check with my co-workers on Monday if it is still an issue.
I still can’t logon, nor can I map drives logged on as different user.
Shares that were made before still work; so I have not lost any data.
I was going to repair windows, and noted that that procedure will accept my administrative password and user.
I can’t swear that the last thing I did was run anti spyware s/w. It is run fairly regularly. Another doper was helping; he/she wanted to know the contents of my ntbtlog.txt. I hope he/she chimes in.
As you may have read, this has happened to us several times this year; but only on the XP machine; the W2K never seems to take the hit; and we peruse the same sites on each. Go figure.
SO by all means, let me know how you resolved it; I will hold off wiping the machine. Thanks!
I don’t think repairing it is a bad approach. Nice thing about XP is repairing leaves your data intact.
I have to profess ignorance here. When I hit R to do repair, all it did was prompt me to logon (with administrator account) and then just gave me a DOS prompt.
Is repair presupposing I know what’s wrong; in that case it’s useless since I do not know what’s wrong.
Am I doing something wrong regarding “repair”?
Well, if you know a tiny bit of dos you might be able to fix it.
I finally remembered the software we used that caused the problem, Adaware (hehe, you mentioned it even, oops). I searched Lavasoft’s help files and came up with this:
http://www.lavasofthelp.com/articles/v6/04/06/0901.html
It is exactly the problem you described and how to fix it using the repair (recovery console) option.
Let us know if that doesn’t work. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve.
Followed the directions (copied userinit.exe over wsaupdate.exe but when I reboot I still don’t get a list of usernames.
Funny enough someone at work claimed they had this same problem and the Lavasoft fix worked for them. I feel cursed!