When I booted up my home computer this morning, running WinXP, instead of opening up straight to my desktop it brought me to a login screen, asking me to choose which user to log in as. Unfortunately there were no choices to pick on the right side of the screen (I've never had multiple users or profiles on that machine). Only options were to restart or turn off. I did both and each time it brought me back to the same screen when rebooted. Anyone know how this happened or how to fix it?

I'm on my work computer now, I can't get past that screen on my home computer to run any programs.

Are you able to use the F8 menu to boot into safe mode? There should be an administrator user listed then. you'll need your admin password, then create a user for yourself to log into.

That's my suggestion. lol

Interesting, I haven't tried it (didn't remember which "f" key was safe mode). When and why would I have created an admin password (so I know where to look)?

well, I was prompted to create an Administrator password when I installed Win XP on my new computer, so that would be the when I'm guessing. F8 as it first starts booting to windows should bring up a menu of safe mode options.

That's about all the experience I have with it. hope it helps.

Hope no one has taken over your pc Gwyd. when you get it sorted out, I'd suggest disableing fast user switching, and secondary login. If you are the only user and do not plan on accessing your pc from another location, then you can cut that crap off. You can do this by going to controll panel, performance and maintenence, administrative tools, and clicking on services. When you see the list, scroll down untill you see Fast user switching. hilight it with your mouse and on the top left corner click Stop, then go to where you hilighted and right click, scroll down to properties, and click. Stay in the general tab. Look in the midle of that window untill you see an option called startup type: If it is set to automatic, then set it to disable. Do the same steps for Secondary Login. You will likely never have this problem again. I do apologize for the lenthy instructions. just makeing sure i havent left anything out.

Still having the problem. Looks like I caught a virus or something that changes passwords, as even the Admin logon was password protected, though I never set a password. Tech support "officially" told me I needed to do a complete reinstall, but "unofficially" told me where to find password retrieval and profile hacking programs to try to get back in. If that works I can re-change my passwords and virus scan the whole thing to clean out the problem. Hopefully it will work.

Might also want to run Spybot, Ad-Aware, and Microsoft AntiSpyware (or whatever the crap it's called now...I guess it's Windows Defender) and the TrendMicro Scanner in addition to your virus scanner. It's a lot of stuff, but it'll get you cleaned out.

Yeah I planned on using TrendMicro. I usually run their HouseCall about once a month or so. Guess I should have run it before I shut down last week.

Still no joy. Recovery tool was a bust, it couldn't even find the user profiles in the SAM hive (including the Administrator account). May be headed for a complete system reinstall.

I'd been meaning to clean out some crap from my hard drive but this is a bit more than I wanted to do. Bleh.

Sorry to here it man. Computers are great when they work, but hell when they don't. You can read all about my woes in the that one thread.

Meh, it's good to nuke one every so often...but it's usually a little less stressful to do it when you decide it's time, not when your compy does...

For the last five or six years, I've adopted the strategy of always having more than one hard drive in a system, or at the very least have the main drive partionen. 99% of the time its the OS partition/drive that gets screwed, and everything else is normally left almost totally unscathed.

I've only once lost a drive that wasn't the one holding windows with no warning, and once lost a non OS drive another time to S.M.A.R.T. failure though there were warning signs that it was going bad. Had I known what they meant, I could have moved everything months before it failed.

Well, one complete system reinstall later and here I am, back in action.

(Now all I have to do is reinstall all my programs. Ugh.)

Pain in the butt.

Thanks all for the help and moral support. Banzai!

I'm glad to hear you are on you way to getting back up and running Gwyd

If I may make a suggestion. If you've got two or more drives OR you have a DVD burner, I'd very strongly suggest getting Norton Ghost or Powerquest DriveImage. They both do the same thing, but once you have everything just the way you like it, you make an 'image' of your hard drive when things are still clean.

In the event you ever run into trouble, you just pop in your recovery disks, point to your backups (or put them in the DVD drive if you went that route) and in a matter of minutes. VOILA! A clean copy of windows with everything you had at the time you made the image.

I've been doing that for years now, and pretty much don't worry or care at all about viruses, windows getting slowed down from countless installs/uninstalls of programs, registry getting bloated, none of it worries me whatsoever.

Even if you have to use it only once or twice, the time it saves pays for itself imho.

Thanks Free, sounds like a nice way to be safe, unfortunately I have neither an additional drive nor a DVD burner.

However, I now have a brand new SP2 WindowsXP disc, about a gazillion anti-spyware, anti-adware, and anti-virus programs, as well as a brand new firewall and a set of instructions (for technical neanderthals like me) for backing up my important stuff such that I can (hopefully) avoid the technological trauma I just endured.

Reinstalled Mercs today too, up to MP3.02a, though I'm not sure I have all the maps and crap I used to have. I ran into some problems with terrains and terrain patching, inasmuch as though while I have my original Vengeance discs, I never owned BlackKnight. I had the info from a BK CD sector-mapped onto my hard drive that I used to use which is now completely gone. DL'd the terrains from MekTek but I don't think I remembered correctly how to install it all. I guess it will be trial and error as maps come up that won't work for me.

Still no Ventrilo or TS2, and no FTP program, and all my cool screenshots and other saved content have been lost into the virtual ether, but it's nice to just have a working computer again (and it's faster now without all the miscellaneous stuff gumming up the works).

Have you ever tried the NBT map CDs Gwyd? There's a ton of crap on them, and it's one installer. I may have used them once, I don't remember.

I always forget to back up my screenshots when I either uninstall or nuke. I wish I hadn't.

Just out of curiosity...did you wipe and reinstall on the same hard drive, or did you buy a new one? If you still have the old one, I'd guess you could get back in and get your files off of it even if XP was horked.

If, however, you wiped and installed on the same HD...it would be harder. Depends on how you did it. If you have partitions, and you set them up like you had them before, you might have a shot and recovering files with the right utility.

And if it happens again...I have CD we lovingly call "The Key" that will rip the Windows admin password off and let you put in a new one. Had to use it to recover laptops every so often when I was deployed.

Same hard drive, I've written off everything that used to be on it as lost.

As for "the Key," I already tried what I guess was a similar Linux utility that was supposed to be able to retrieve and/or change the Admin password. It didn't work because my entire admin profile was missing, as were all the others.

Erm... you could have used the option to repair the windows XP installation. Keeps all your files while fixing the broken system stuff.

Before I reinstalled I tried that too, no dice. I had updated XP to SP2 but only had the disc for my original installation so it couldn't repair everything. I clicked through the missing file messages to fix as much as possible, but when I rebooted afterwards the same login problem cropped up.