Okay, A friend of mine asked me to look at her moms computer because it wasn't working. She said it stopped working after she tried to put XP on it (what a surprise) Anyways, I took it home and booted it up. The windows 98 splash (logo.sys) screen came up, background loaded, but no icons or startmenu bar, just the wallpaper and the mouse cursor. The only thing that reacts is the good ole 3 finger salute. When that is done the only thing running is explorer. Okay, so first thing I did was the ole scanreg restore bit. It worked. I got the desktop back and everything is fine. Well, almost...

Her mother had MSWord 95 installed and wanted to have it upgraded to Office 2000. So thats fine. I grab the cd and start loading it up. It finishes the installation and tells me I need to reboot to finish the installation.

This is the weird part... After I rebooted, I recieved the same previous error....

Now, I can boot into safe mode and everything loads on the desktop. All the icons are there, the start menu, etc.. So I figure it has to be one of the following:
  • Corrupt Registry
  • Corrupt vxd driver
  • A bad statement in the win.ini
  • Bad statement in the system.ini
  • Autoexec.bat or config.sys did something weird


Well, I have checked all of these and everything appears fine. I've checked the registry localuser/blahblah/run and run- and runonce, nothing there.

I've gone thru the selective bootups and booted without the system.ini, win.ini, checked the autoexec.bat and the config.sys and booted with each selected seperatly to narrow it down... But I'm still getting the error in a normal boot.

Log in safe mode? everything is fine.

I've run all the system information tools and verified the vxds and .dlls and replaced a few from cabs, registry, ect... still nothing... I've run scandisk and that finds no errors.

I've also run the scanreg /fix.. nada..

What am I missing here? This is beginning to drive me nuts.

I know I can just reformat reinstall, but I know there has to be a way of getting this and I'm determined to get it going. (last night I was actually comparing an export of the previous good registry(pre-office) and the new registry(post-office) line by line)

Oh I've also checked the bootgui bootdir, etc... in the msdos.sys file.. all is fine in there.


So any suggestions? (beside the reformat reinstall, which is gunna happen tonight when I get no replies on this thread)

Oh... BTW.... I don't think XP got into the installation at all, because the first thing it does is put in the boot.ini boot menu, which wasn't on the machine... but am I missing somethin else in there that XP left?