I am still and about looking for information, but I thought I would see if anyone here has any ideas. I am going to blame the problems I am having on the last two patches that I downloaded from Microsoft, since things were working just fine before then. I have WinXP Professional.

So, I installed the two patches, rebooted, and after seeing the splash screen, it eventually comes up with an error in winlogon.exe stating "The application has failed to start because SHLWAPI.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem".

I originally thought to myself, ok, no problem, boot up into safe mode and do a recovery.
(@##@$@%&)! For some reason, the normal F5/F8 thing at bootup will not work (it should cause a prompt asking what I want to do, boot normally, safe mode, safe mode with networking, etc). I have tried it several times, including after going into the BIOS and disabling QuickBoot. No dice. Grrr.

The next normal step I guess would be to try a recovery diskette; however, I would like to make this a last option since I don't have a diskette (I am going to try to burn a recovery CD later, but would rather not have to go into work to find another machine to do it from). So, given that I wanted to avoid trying to use a diskette, I inserted the XP Cdrom, changed my boot order in the BIOS and rebooted.

I get the nice little message about press a key to boot from CD. CD Spins up and then it switches over to the HDD and tries to boot off of it... @#$#&$#$$#@&%#&$!!!!! (I have no idea why it decided to do this, the CD is obviously working well enough to generate the boot message and it doesn't look damaged/scratched). Tried making the CD the only boot device, and it still goes on right past it and tries to boot of the HDD regardless of whether the XP CD is in the drive or not...Grrr...

Any ideas short of removing this drive from this computer and copying data and then blowing the entire thing away (I am going to try to create a recovery disk first, but given the unpleasantness I have seen so far, I am not holding my breath).

Thanks,

/nebulus