Hey all,

I normally use my Linux box and Mac at home, but I've been doing some "Christmas" cleaning and lo and behold a windows box was found, abandoned long ago! My mom spotted this and was quite keen on using this to check her email, write letters and stuff like that. I turn it on, and try to make her a new account, but Control Panel doesn't open. Neither does Explorer.exe, IE, or anything of any actual usefulness (I think that was why I abandoned windows in the first place).

This is getting to be a bit of a pain. I did a CHKDSK (with and without /f parameter) and got nothing better. Could someone please help? I run XP on a basic Dell, Pentium 4.

Thanks in advance,
DCheng

P.S. I was wondering; would this be a hardware or software problem? If it's just software, a clean install of Windows is not a big hassle.