Problems booting XP after patch

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

If I remember correctly The Xp install Cd has a recovery pre-installed on it. I was kinda smart I don't trust M$ patches so I said the hell with it. I never installed. The only advice that I can think of would be go in your Biosto and set it so that Boot from Hard Drive is Last on the list put Boot from CDrom then disk and so on. Ok know the reason that I think that is happening is because, M$ is pretty known for over writing is out Data probably in the Source of that file it is written somewhere ignore everything untill the first time that you get back into XP. They are common for that one Kinda pissed me off once to.

If none of that works you could UNPLUG the damn thing take out your Mother Board battery I believe that would reset the entire thing and you should have no problem after that.

As a warning so you know ****ing with that battery is dangerous.

I think that should do it. Remember the thing about the tire that is deflating, everyday a new hole annd everyday a new patch.

Jizz

Already tried the BIOS boot order (see original message).
Have the HDD mounted in a Win2k machine at the moment...gonna probably grab my data and format. Hmm...maybe should have splurged the extra 20 bucks for a Floppy drive :)

/nebulus

EDIT: What I have done so far:

copied SHLWAPI.dll from LastGood on harddrive (while it is mounted in win2k) to \windows\system32. Booted. It quit complaining about winlogon but then bitched about odbc32.dll and msgina.dll. Strange...those are not in LastGood...grr...copied original files from CDROM, used expand to inflate them, copied to hdd. Booted. This time it gets through windows logon, but dies starting up a messenger (oh yeah, that makes a hell of alot of sense). Going to copy old filesfrom HDD, remove messenger from startup and try it again. If it still doesn't work or won't let me boot off of CDROM to recover, then will probably format it and move on. Thanks to those that looked at this.

/nebulus

Yeah I am glad I did splurg the extra money for a Floppy God I needed when I first was playin around with my Laptop I forgot how to change the order of my Boot Process so I ended up with never being able to install Linux from my d: so I had to make a Boot Disk to do it. After I stop being an idiot and remembered I set it up the right way.

What about taking out your Motherboards battery. I should work considering that it was probably written osmewhere on your CMOS. Hum..

I think that if you were to throw the damn thing out the window you would be fine. lol

Oh yeah last hope if I remember correctly would be put in a Linux disk they usually over look the CMOS and you could go in and then change your Boot CMOS boot order I believe that it shows you them and all other OS's on your system. Then after that kill it. Try to start back up.

Jizz

Final update: Figured out why F5/F8/boot from CDROM weren't working. The keyboard was using the USB port and the PC wasn't recognizing the keys for some strange reason (it would however recognize if I hit DEL and went to the BIOS settings :rolleyes: ). Quick USB to PS/2 coverter and whola, boot from CDROM. Working on repairing it now.

/nebulus

Quote:

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Originally posted here by nebulus200
Final update: Figured out why F5/F8/boot from CDROM weren't working. The keyboard was using the USB port and the PC wasn't recognizing the keys for some strange reason (it would however recognize if I hit DEL and went to the BIOS settings :rolleyes: ). Quick USB to PS/2 coverter and whola, boot from CDROM. Working on repairing it now.

/nebulus

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Sounds like XP is completely FUBAR for some reason. I don't know of any dodgy updates recently that would cause this - I know of several PCs (like this one!) that are bang up to date without any problems.

The keyboard problem you describe does make some sort of sense, as XP has its own mechanism for detecting it, which is not the same as the one that the BIOS uses. You can usually tell that XP has picked up your keyboard as you see the Caps Lock & Scroll Lock LEDs flash on and off, just before you enter your password to log on.

This could well be a dodgy HDD - I have seen similar problems in the past when the HDD was on the way out, and would intermittently cause all sorts of weird problems.
You can try running chkdsk with the /r option from the Recovery console to see if it finds anything amiss.

This is a relatively brand new computer (3-6 months old, AMD Athlon 2800+, 120GB WD HDD, 512 MB Corsair 333DDR memory, etc, so I am leaning against a hardware failure) and the patches were all up to date except for a rollup patch of IE (August) and one other one that I unfortunately do not remember what it was (it was unfortunately labeled Microsoft has discovered a vulnerability that ... blah blah blah, should have read it closer). It is currently doing the recovery off of the CDROM and is working fine now, albeit with some reinstallation of programs needed.

As far as the USB thing goes, I agree it does make some sense, I just unfortunately didn't think about it until shortly before I made that post (I had been assuming that the KB was working since it let me do the BIOS stuff), but I guess that old saying about assumptions applies here...

Thanks for the help.

/nebulus

I agree it's very unlikely to be a HDD failure, but on the other hand I have seen exactly the same sort of symptoms recently on two different PCs, both of which were less than 3 months old.

And in each case chkdsk came back with an unrecoverable hardware error :D

Just something to add to the check list, anyway.

Just a thought, but it sounds like your registry got whacked. Unless you are prepared to restore the registry from a back-up, you may want to try re-installing the patch and re-booting.
XP will normally rebuild it's registry on start up. If it does'nt then try the ERD

this could also be a result from bad ram.

Its fully repaired, after I could get it to boot from the CDROM, I chose to reinstall, and then a little further into it, you can tell it to repair the installation. I only had to update a couple of drivers and of course reapply all the patches (this time it didn't nuke anything). All of my other settings, hardware, programs, etc were unchanged and work fine.

/nebulus

We had at work a number of workstations with win2k that would not start after the winupdates.

I suspect that Nortton Anttivirus software might corrupt some files during servicepack 4 installation.

Just a guess really, but I wonder if you happend to have NAV on the box while running the updates?

Yes I did have NAV running while updating; however, I had long since installed SP4 with it running on Win2k with no issues. I also had NAV running on the XP box; however, when I went through and patched it after repairing it, I also had it running when it installed all the patches (including the one that nuked me), so I don't think it had much to do with NAV.

/nebulus

SP4 sound full of bug... If you read this page http://www.w2knews.com/anecdotes.htm . Have a good read. :)