Booting XP stops at welcome screen?

[philzucker]

Recently my S10e shows a annoying behaviour - it boots WinXP correctly until the welcome screen is reached; then the system doesn't go any further - hard disc activity continues, and occasionally the hourglass icon next to the mouse pointer arrow appears, but this goes on for minutes without the desktop appearing. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't do anything, and the only thing that helps is pressing the power button for a couple of seconds (shutting down the S10e) and rebooting it. Sometimes only the third attempt succeeds in booting through to the desktop - the welcome screens then is visible only for some seconds, as it should be. Did anyone have similar troubles? And if so, did you find a way to stop that weird behaviour?

All suggestions welcome!

Phil

[SilverZero]

My sister's Vaio was like that when she got it from a friend. It would boot up, then stay on a blank desktop with no icons or anything for as long as I ever waited for it. The previous user was a Limewire user with no idea how to avoid dangerous files, so . . . you know. After running the recovery program (Sony has an OKR-type feature as well), it was back to normal.

[philzucker]

Thanks for the reply. I'm sure I didn't install anything nasty yet, and the weird thing is that the S10e boots correctly one time, and hangs on the welcome screen (not showing the desktop) the next time. No real pattern I can discern here.

I'll try controlled booting of windows next to find a possible software culprit; I hope it isn't EkoBatt, but the troubles started before installing it ...

Phil

[philzucker]

... solved the problem the radical way - by using the recovery function and reverting to the original setup. Nothing else helped - will be very careful to install additional software, and will do a reboot after installing every single one now!

Phil