I am living a similar situation currently.
It began after a severe cleaning of the sons computer a Dell xps T-600 P4 Celeron 1.4ghz w 768m ram, C= WD 160gb & D= WD 250gb. It was filled with rootkits, trojans, adware and hijackers. I ran just about every recommended cleaning tool out there to finally get it working. I performed a Chkdsk /f c: several times to make sure the files were ok and all looked well. I used Secunia PSI to update the drivers and associated files which seemed to work as touted.
The "servicing" efforts lasted about a week (maybe) and then the unit began to hang on the GUI screen which required a reboot and then we uncovered a Keyboard 210 error during the boot. After several reboots, I thought it may be the keyboard, a swap to a different KB and system appeared to boot properly, or so I thought. Now it became intermittent. It seemed that a possible short in the PS/2 keyboard socket perhaps? I went back to the original keyboard and took the keyboard apart, did a major cleaning of very ham sandwich, chicken wings and pretzels he had eaten in the last 3 years!I I hooked it up and no more Keyboard 210 error, however the GUi desktop hangup problem remained.
I went out a got a USB keyboard, NO change. With each reboot, the problem worsened and we barely got to the desktop page when we would get mouse and screen freezes. When I finally go it to load, I installed the WinXP disk and attempted to perform a SFC /Scannow, it ran for about 30 secs and froze. Several more attempts failed to get even that far with the screen and mouse freezes.
I also tried doing a scannow from the SAFE mode, but it declined that.
I downloaded the WD diagnostics and ran that on the BOOT hard drive and everything came back clean.
I ran MEM386 and the memory all came back clean.
I decided to open the case and do a house cleaning. It certainly needed it. I even pulled the CPU & its fan assembly, it needed much TLC and cleaning big time. While I was in there, i reseated all of the cards and memory for good luck. Nothing really improved, system still froze after GUI boot sequence.
( just one added point, somehow after all of the above I asked Winxp to check the disk it went into a Chkdsk on one of the boots and it got past Stage 1 and then hung up on Stage 2- verifying indexes and stayed at 0-zero)
The system will boot to the SAFE mode with Network connection and operate, but I am unable to figure out what next steps to take at this point.
I did try to use the Win XP install disk when I was able to get the machine to read it, but I got a message that said the Version of XP installed was "Later" than the version I was attempting to "install/use" for repair, so I didn't do anything, not knowing the outcome.
My son claims all of his important files on on the D:\, thus worst case scenario would be a reformat of the C;\ and a fresh install. Though I am reticent to do that just yet, believing there is still hope to salvage the info on the c:\ boot drive and repair the drive and WinXP install for a short period until he gets he own Laptop in a week or so.
HELP PLEASE!
