Windows completely hangs - fine in safe mode

[Pho]

I've been asked to take a look at a laptop for someone and I'm pretty stumped. It's got XP SP3, it's virus free, got lots of free hard disk space and has recently been defragged with MyDefrag; all in all it looks in pretty good shape.

However, when you load windows up normally it just hangs at the desktop; no mouse movement, no keyboard input accepted at all. Even the power button seems to fail and you have to take out the battery / AC lead to shut it down.

When I load it up in safe mode it's perfectly fine. I've tried using the diagnostic startup in msconfig (it stops lots of startup programs running) and that doesn't help either.

It's an Acer laptop running XP SP3. Any ideas?

 

[Six6siX]

Came across an older HP laptop which did the same thing once. After several reinstalls of windows and the slow process of installing drivers one by one from different sources, I found that only when initialising and installing the sound driver did the machine to lock up.

Obviously, sound drivers werent loaded in safe mode so it was fine.

May be something similar?

 

[Jason1973]

Run sigverif.exe from safemode for a list of unsigned drivers.

Get signed drivers installed.

 

[Pho]

Cheers for the replies. As it turns out I think it might have been the battery; I took it out and booted Windows and it seemed ok, and even when it was in it was showing 0% battery despite being on charge for a good while.