WinXP Home log on - log off endless loop

Factual Questions
1

Friend’s computer issues-- past several days, if left unattended, would lock up. No response to keyboard or mouse. There is only one button on the case, not separate ‘On/Off’ and ‘Reset’ buttons. Button would do nothing. (Begs the question of what was the button programmed to do originally-- ‘On/Off’, ‘Reset’ or ‘Standby’ – friend has no clue.) At any rate, had to unplug machine, replug, and it would boot normally.

He ran SpyBot, which claimed to find some malware (he doesn’t remember what) and claimed to remove it. Then it wanted the usual reboot. So far, seems typical.

But on reboot, machine POSTs then starts Windows, rolls thru to Log In screen. There is only one account, no password ever used, so click that account. Now the fun starts.

Instead of opening Windows, machine says “Logging Off”, “saving your personal settings”, then returns to the login screen. It will do this as many times as you wish to attempt the login. Endless loop.

Same thing happens if you F8 and choose Safe Mode. Same thing if you choose Last Good Config.

Endless loop of logins. Sigh.

Of course, this is a Compac about 5 years old, with an AMD Athalon running WinXP Home. Compac did not supply a Win CD/DVD, and of course my friend never made the recommended backup disk.

Any suggestions? (Besides the obvious ones involving great heights and/or heavy steel implements, of course. He’s already thought of those.)

2

Sounds like his OS is hosed…you might need to contact Compaq/HP to get a disc, or they might be able to tell you how to access the OS via a small partition they made when they shipped the machine.

As for the button on the machine - I haven’t run into a machine with more than one button in a long time. If the machine is hanging, hold down the button until it shuts off. No need to unplug it!!

3

Thanks!! Yeah, I think it’s hosed too.

Perhaps it’s only the current registry. Does Win have a convention for sequential naming of the current registry, and the older, saved registries? If so, I could use the Command Prompt to (rename) make the older registry into the current one, effectively “stepping back” as Windows does within its shell as “Restore to an earlier time”.

Now the damn machine is taking up half of my executive assistant’s desk, since my other staffer brought it here from home and set it up in what he figured was available space, so I could “lay hands” on it. My assistant wants to strangle him, and toss the machine in the lake.

As for the damn button-- I held it in for about 5 minutes, and still no reaction. My arm got tired. That’s when I unplugged it.

4

When you turn it on, tap F8 repeatedly until you get a text menu. From here you can try booting into Safe Mode or use the Last Known Good configuratino.

I’d try the latter first. From the sounds of it, I don’t think the OS itself is bad. Rather, I’d guess that either some software was installed and went sideways, or an update was applied that did the same. Regardless, Safe Mode might let you undo whatever’s been done recently and get XP back.

5

Thanks, but-- been there, done that. As I said in the OP (which, I grant, is rather wordy) same problem occurs when Safe Mode is selected and when Last Good is selected. Login → Loging out → Saving your personal settings → Login screen reappears. Endless loop. Damn!

6

Sort of. You can try the following:

(Note: The following was posted here on the SDMB by another doper, whose name I do not remember. So if these are your instructions, thank you very much, I’ve used them several times to recover systems.)

Once you’ve got the drive migrated into a working XP machine, you need to go to your Folder Options and make sure that the check boxes are set to (a) view hidden files, and (b) view critical Operating System files. You will be warned that these are both bad ideas. Don’t sweat it.

In my case, the parasite drive was E:, so I went to E:\WINDOWS\system32\config and made backup copies of the files

default
sam
security
system
software

in that directory. I simply renamed them to *.bak, in case I (ha ha) wanted to restore to the previous, non-working condition.

I went to the System Volume Information folder in E:, and after looking up how a WinXP Home user opens this file under NTFS, opened it successfully. (WinXP won’t let you open the folder, even as admin, but it will let you try to share the folder on the LAN. After this process fails, you are able to look at the contents of the folder. The process is different depending on the version of XP and the filesystem you’re using.)

In this folder, I found a sub-folder called “_restore{1756EDF7-C75F-481E-8EBF-9B466A0579E5}” (YMMV on the name) and opened it. Inside this, there was a cornucopia of folders called RPxxx, where “xxx” is a three-digit number. I opened the highest-numbered of these, and found a “snapshot” folder containing old, slightly-renamed, copies of the five files above (default and the four S-words, each with something like “USER.RESTORE.REGISTRY.” appended to the filename). I copied these to E:\WINDOWS\system32\config and then renamed them to the shortened forms of their names.

I powered my machine down, migrated the drive over to the ailing box, and the booted her machine into WinXP. The one oddity was that I had to re-activate her copy of WinXP on startup. Other than that, it was just like doing a manual system restore.

7

Has this computer been updated with SP 3 yet? If it has, there is a documented problem with AMD processors and XP updated to SP3. There is a fix for it here:
http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/archive/2008/05/08/does-your-amd-based-computer-boot-after-installing-xp-sp3.aspx

8

Hmmmmmmmmmm…

Well, that may be something to try. Thanks to all!

Any other suggestions before I start? Like, can I create any kind of recovery disk on another machine that might help this machine? I have several machines running XP-Pro, but none running XP-Home.