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don_rowlettFlag for United States of America

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XP Boots to a blank screen with white cursor

I have a windows xp professional laptop that will come up to the login screen allow you to login and then sit at a black screen with a white cursor.  If I hit ctrl alt del, it will go into the task manager.  If I hit the power off button, I get the box that says windows is shutting down.  When I restart it, all I get is the black screen.  I have let it set for 30 minutes with no results.  I can move the cursor around the screen.  It does the same thing in safe mode.
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I ran a chkdsk /R and it finished this without any errors.  When I typed exit and it rebooted I got the following message "To help protect your computer, windows has closed this program.  Run a DLL as an App"  I closed this window and it would sit at a black screen with the white cursor.  I am starting it think it might be a virus.
It looks like it, I would use the UBCD and boot from the cd and run some of the utilities from it.
Im sorry.  What is the UBCD??  Will it allow me to check and remove viruses?
UBCD stands for Ultimate Boot CD. It comes with some very nice features, and utilities, it's also free. There's some tools that come on the CD to help remove viruses. Here's the link: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
I have seen this problem before, if the UBCD don't work, the last thing would be to take your hard drive out and put it into another computer as slave, backup any information or data you want to save, then put the hard drive back into the original computer and do a reinstall of Windows XP.
Also, the UBCD doesn't just have helpful virus removal tools, it has alot of great utilities.
I have tried the fixmbr and get the same results I am downloading the UBCD now.  I am hopping I can boot from this cd and scan and remove viruses from my drive and then windows xp will boot.  I will keep you posted.
I tried to use the UBCD that I made.  It boots into the initial menu screen.  I select to boot the ulitimate CD and I see the windows XP splashscreen and then I get the BSOD with a stop error of 0000007B.  I will try again tomorrow.  Thanks for your suggestions.
You can also try Hiren's Boot CD. It has a lot of great utilities that may help.  

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

Both of these Boot CDs test and repair hardware issues mostly.  You should make a linux bootable USB stick and use that to retreive your data, and then reinstall Windows.

This linux distro is samll easy to use

http://www.puppylinux.org/
I tried quite a few things but in the end, I did a windows repair installation that allowed me to boot.  Thank you for the help.