Bootup Hangs After Login: "NTOH.EXE" Trying to Load

[ShawnF]

Hello,

I've got a Windows 2000 Dell laptop that after hitting Ctrl, Alt, Del and logging in (as any user or admin), it hangs after the login window disappears but before the desktop loads. E.G. it hangs at a blue screen background with the mouse pointer as an hour glass. It's not a blue screen of death screen though. You can let it sit for an hour and it won't boot into normal mode. It will boot into safe mode. I can access the system try while it's hung up, and I can see several copies of "NTOH.EXE" coming and going and causing a lot of hard drive activity. I have never heard of this and did a google search and found nothing. Does this ring a Bell for anyone?

I'm trying to find a way to fix this short of restoring the machine.

Thanks,

Shawn

 

[ShawnF]

Spyware!

Since I could get into safemode but not into regular mode, and since W2k does not include msconfig, I transferred over a copy from an XP machine. I shut off everything under the startup tab, but strangely did not see ntoh.exe in there, or in the registry "run" folders. Sooo, I rebooted and it booted this time with everything off. I sequentally turned everything back on and rebooted but the failure never happened again. How odd... So, I connected to the internet to test it out, and the homepage was hijacked. I ran Spybot and Adaware and combined they found almost 200 items.

I cleaned them out and the problem is fixed. No wonder I couldn't find any info on ntoh.exe.....