We downloaded a WinXP Pro reboot disk and the Win XP Pro start-up disks from MSFT's main website.  Put them on six floppies and then we tried to re-load Win XP Pro as one of the options given after the installation of all six disks.  It wouldn't allow us to do that because of a missing or corrupted file so we re-booted and re-loaded all six floppies and then selected the repair option.  It claimed that it could not make the necessary repair because of a missing or corrupted file.   So we referenced the help section to try and understand all the commands to see if we could use any of them and we decided to wait rather than to proceed since we did not know what the hell we were doing.  I mentioned in my initial OP that my son had manually deleted some files, but he has since stressed to me that all he did was delete some Ad-ware programs that could only be completely deleted by re-booting.  Only problem was that when we re-booted we could only get as far as the user sign-in with the password.  Cute piano notes  would indicate we were signing in along with the 'loading your personal settings' display soon to be followed after about five seconds by not-so-cute piano notes  indicating that you were logging off.  

Wait a minute ... this won't help

i'm sorry that xp sucks so bad?!  msft got it wrong with this one.  i've heard too many complaints and like i told you i bought a usb keyboard and i'm running on a two year old ME machine.

 

you're using xp "pro" and my is xp "home edition" so that explains the difference?!

 

at least my daughter can use my new laptop for winnie the pooh.

 

good luck my friend, i hope you don't lose anything important, but it looks like you're going to need a utility to start in dos prompt to try to get files you don't want to lose off the hard disk before you do a restore with the cd that should have come with the computer in the first place?!

jfo

 

I gave up drinking the wrong year ...  sigh..

OH MY DOG!  i never realized that "ini", that's why you're such a... nevermind just kidding!  but those files can be a pain in the arss!

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.  We ended up wiping the hard drive and starting over.  My son and a friend of his planned to transfer all our files and folders to our other computer, then do a clean install of Win XP, and then re-load all our files and folders.  They did this late last night and I do not see that they were able to save anything so I guess we are starting from scratch again.  Oh, well.

i'm very sorry to hear that, mav!

 

i bought ME, but i'm scared to install it on the xp machine because of the "designed for XP" logo on the computer?!

 

i think xp sucks!  and i just don't know what that means to me and the future of this xp machine i bought.

 

all the best,

jfo

Who did you blow away?

Oh...... never mind.