Up until now no startup problems whatsoever with my system. Today, I press
the start button and it boots fine to the Windows' Welcome Screen. When I
click on my account icon (no password ever entered) it tries to login (I see
my desktop for about 4-5 seconds) but it comes back to the same Windows'
Welcome Screen after about 5-10 seconds. My significant other also has an
account icon and when she tries to login from the welcome screen she cannot
get pass the screen either and gets the same 5-10 seconds looping problem
that happens to me. System specs: Dell Deminsion 3000; Windows XP Home
Edition w/Service Pack 3; 2.80 GHZ Intel Pentium 4; and 1GB DDR Memory. No
recent hardware changes made to system.
Many Thanks in Advance on any solution and Have A Super, Safe One Ahead!
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Sounds like a trojan/virus has hit the system resulting in a userinit
problem.
I have used the approach below several times to a positive result.
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Logon/Log off problems usually associated with userinit being corrupted or
removed/replaced by spyware/trojans
My fix:
1) Remove the hard drive.
2) Attach the hard drive to another computer. Either use an external USB
connection, or replace the good computer's CDROM with the bad computer's
hard drive.
3) Have the good computer's antivirus scan and remove the virus. Make sure
the antivirus is using the latest virus definitions. You can use a spyware
scanner as well such as Superantispyware or Malwarebytes.
Ok, now to fix the logging off issue.
1) Click Start, select Run, and type in the following: REGEDIT
2) In the registry editor, click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to highlight it.
3) Click File, and then "Load Hive..."
4) Guide it to the bad hard drive's WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG folder and
select the SOFTWARE file.
5) Name it "IWILLREMEMBERTOUNLOADTHIS" or anything else.
7) Open the IWILLREMEMBERTOUNLOADTHIS and go to the Microsoft/Windows
NT/CurrentVersion/Winlogon
8) In the right, find the "Userinit" key and change it is value to the
following: C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe,
(The virus/trojan likes to add extra commands to this, so you usually just
have to delete the extra stuff after this)
9) Check and make sure that the Shell key has a value of "Explorer.exe" as
well (no quotes).
10) Go back and highlight the IWILLREMEMBERTOUNLOADTHIS, then click file and
unload the hive.
Often times your antivirus will remove the userinit.exe file. If you have
the same version of Windows this is a good time to copy it from the
c:\Windows\System32 folder to the Windows\System32 folder on the attached
hard drive.
See post by steven mahaffey
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1125013404
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Regards,
Touch Base
Report back on the results, good or bad so others may benefit