Hello Everyone.
I was looking at a friend's machine tonight for some problems and I am totally stumped, so I figured I would ask here.
The machine is a 6 month old Dell desktop, running XP Home, SP1. My friend and his wife went away for a few days, and when they came back their computer wasnt working. Their kids insist that they didnt do anything.....riiiiiiight.
Anyway, the machine will boot fine up until the user selection screen. Each of the family members has an account, so there are 5 different users. When you click on any of them, the machine tries to load the account (as in, it will sometimes show a background, the HD LED will flash, etc.) and then give one of several error messages. The majority of these messages say that the machine cannot verify that windows is activated, or that it cant find the license for the machine. Also several parse errors are given.
I attempted to boot the machine into safe mode and log into the administrator account, and once it locked giving me the same error, and another time it let me in with no problems. The machine has no floppy drive, so I was unable to run my command line virus scanner tonight.
Im thinking that the kids either got a virus, or somehow deleted something windows needs.
Does anyone have any ideas at all how to help out? Or is a reinstall the only thing in my future? Sorry for such a long post, and thanks in advance for any help you can offer!!
~Bug
I was looking at a friend's machine tonight for some problems and I am totally stumped, so I figured I would ask here.
The machine is a 6 month old Dell desktop, running XP Home, SP1. My friend and his wife went away for a few days, and when they came back their computer wasnt working. Their kids insist that they didnt do anything.....riiiiiiight.
Anyway, the machine will boot fine up until the user selection screen. Each of the family members has an account, so there are 5 different users. When you click on any of them, the machine tries to load the account (as in, it will sometimes show a background, the HD LED will flash, etc.) and then give one of several error messages. The majority of these messages say that the machine cannot verify that windows is activated, or that it cant find the license for the machine. Also several parse errors are given.
I attempted to boot the machine into safe mode and log into the administrator account, and once it locked giving me the same error, and another time it let me in with no problems. The machine has no floppy drive, so I was unable to run my command line virus scanner tonight.
Im thinking that the kids either got a virus, or somehow deleted something windows needs.
Does anyone have any ideas at all how to help out? Or is a reinstall the only thing in my future? Sorry for such a long post, and thanks in advance for any help you can offer!!
~Bug
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