Stuck at half an XP Welcome screen ??

[dbota]

I was testing 3 or 4 network cards by turning of the machine (a fully updated XP Pro AMD machine) and substituting them one at a time for the machine's normal Network card and restarting. Everything was going normally until someone came by and using their breath a la birthcake candle style, tried to blow some the dust off the motherboard.

The machine locked up and will not reboot normally into Windows since. It gets as far as the first part of the Welcome screen. I get XP's normal darker blue bar at the top of the screen, the rest of the screen is the normal lighter blue but the account logon icons, and Welcome text of any sort and the darker blue bar normally located at the bottom of the screen are missing. I can't get any farther with the normal boot process.

I find however, that I am able to successfully boot in Safe Mode. Once there, in Device manager under Network Devices, I curiously find that I can see ALL of the network cards I had been testing listed.

I first tried to remove the Network cards listed in the Device Mangler but it would not let me remove any of them. I then tried unsuccessfully to recover by doing a "Driver Rollback", Boot to Last known Good configuration" and by using XP's Restore function. I have tried several of the recent restore points but just end up each time stuck back at the partial Welcome Screen.

I'm kind of assuming that blowing on the running MB caused some sort of major Windows file corruption. ??

Does anyone have any ideas of what happened or how I can fix the problem?

I am thinking of trying to install a second alternate copy of XP on the drive....

 

[bcastner]

Check the video adapter.
Check the heatsink fan lead.
Remove an reinstall all RAM.

Hit F8 early and often. Restart in Safe Mode. When it completely finishes booting in Safe Mode (you have to click once to agree its in Safe Mode) click the Start button and let it do a normal Restart.

 

[dbota]

I tried that the very first thing after booting up in Safe mode. I also restarted from Safe mode a number of times in order to try some of the things I mention above. No improvement.

 

[bcastner]

Download this Winsock service stack repair utility:

http://members.shaw.ca/techcd/VB_Projects/WinsockFix.zip

In Safe Mode again, go to Device Manager.
View, Show all Hidden Devices
Expand Network Adapters
Remove any grayed out devices.

Now run the Winsockfix.exe utility.

Let it reboot into normal mode. Check your TCP/IP properties sheet to be certain everything is as you want for the current adapter.

Please advise again as to your progress with this problem.

 

[dbota]

I guess I haven't been very clear in my description. As soon as I started up in Safe mode and discovered the multiple network adapters listed, I tried to Remove them with Device Manager and it wouldn't let me remove a single one of them. I can't remember what the particular denial message was (I have to go elsewhere to access the internet as I am doing now.)

I can check by tomorrow morning but am not sure if the denial message is that important ... it seems a solution will not be coming from Device Mangler by itself.

 

[bcastner]

The devices listed as "WAN Miniport" devices should be left alone. This was the source of the access denied error 5 messages.

I was asking you to remove any "ghost" device that may appear in a gray color.

Follow the remainder of my earlier tip.