I have a laptop user that sent me his laptop to fix a problem he is having. Every time the laptop boots, it gets to the screen where the "CTRL_ALT_DEL" screen would appear, but never shows that option. Instead, the PC seems to freeze up and then it reboots, never prompting for the "CTRL_ALT_DEL". I am also unable to boot into safe mode.

I have installed a parallel copy of Windows 2000 to the same partition and the system runs fine, so I am guessing this is a software issue.

Any suggestions on what I can do with the damaged operating system install? Can i get anything from the bad OS to make my life easier if I have to use the parallel OS install? I do not want to have to re-install all programs to the new OS if I can prevent it.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Thanks for the suggestion. I do have a reg cleaning utility, but my problem is getting into the corrupt registry. Since I can not even boot into safe mode, how do I clean out the bad registry?

It may be a problem with a registry file and it is doing a memory dump. I do not think it is hardware related----but i may be wrong. Do you have a program to fix the registry? I use a program called "CleanMyPC Registry" thats really great and it makes a copy of your registry, and cleans the crap out.

** bump **