XP Home - logs in and automatically restarts

philstanbridge · 25 Jul 2008 at 17:31

I've got this pc in front of me here - it will boot and login perfectly fine but before it gets to the desktop it simply takes you back to the login screen? I've not seen anything like this before and I'm stumped. Any ideas?

philstanbridge · 25 Jul 2008 at 18:32

..Just to add, I've tried safe mode, and I've rewritten the boot sector of the drive using bootfix in the recovery console. Nothing has helped.

Meronem · 25 Jul 2008 at 20:58

i had this once, basically windows file explorer kept opening on login and it got annoying that I read some articles and proceded to play around in the registry. Apparently there is a bit of spyware that can cause this behaviour too.

In the end, I booted of my XP cd, and installed windows using the repair ("R") optin, I didnt delete the partition or anything like that. It fixed the problem and all my software was still there

philstanbridge · 25 Jul 2008 at 21:05

Meronem said:
i had this once, basically windows file explorer kept opening on login and it got annoying that I read some articles and proceded to play around in the registry. Apparently there is a bit of spyware that can cause this behaviour too.

In the end, I booted of my XP cd, and installed windows using the repair ("R") optin, I didnt delete the partition or anything like that. It fixed the problem and all my software was still there

Thanks for your reply!

I've tried the repair function in the console but it didn't help. I don't have the option to repair in the installation phase. Maybe because it's Windows XP Home and I only have the XP Pro cd - I don't know. I've been doing quite a lot of research tonight. It turns out that a power failure caused this problem and it may well have corrupted the profiles amongst other things.

I've just spent an hour running chkdsk /r and it's found problems and fixed them on the drive, but this is an operating system error and not a fundamental hardware error it would seem.

Best option would be to completely format, but it seems a shame when its only the profiles that have fubar.

Incidentally I can't login as Administrator or the user.

Meronem · 25 Jul 2008 at 21:24

no, i had the same problem..it would happen for any user and in safe mode as well, its a tricky one to fix, I never could be bothered, I just re-installed !

ns400r · 25 Jul 2008 at 21:52

Had one similar the other day. Wouldn't actually log the user off but just close the Explorer process. Was spyware in the end. Control/Alt/Delete still worked on it and I was able to run a removal tool to fix it.

Tool was called Combofix.exe. Might not be any use to you though if your stuck at a login screen.

SimonC · 25 Jul 2008 at 22:50

I had a similar thing on a friends laptop, I could enter the password and login but then all I would see was the desktop picture for about a second then it would say closing network connecting and saving settings. Anyway after doing some googling I used a linux live cd to change a reg file winlogon maybe and it worked fine after that.

Oh and it only started to do that after I ran some anti progs. Ask the owner if they have run adaware/spybot maybe thats the cause?