WinXP Pro Login = Logout loop

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BBoW

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Hi guys,

Last night I must have clicked on a dodgy link and activated something. Computer was fine last night, left it on overnight (internet connected) and this morning there were lots of popups and various other spyware/malware installations captions.

I tried to close them but no luck. Did a restart and the popups started appearing again.

Ran AntiVir followed by AdAware. AntivIR found over 2000!!! alerts and stupid me selected the "delete - and every subsequent detection" option during the scan. This must have deleted some essential files.

Upon restart I now get stuck during the Login stage into windows.
I try logging in, but a few seconds later it says "saving your settings" followed by "logging out" and I'm back at the Login caption.

I tried finding a sollution on these forums and did the boot with the XP Pro CD. This started installing a new XP on the drive, I never had a chance to select Recovery. I did not want to mess things up by interupting the install, so I let it finnish. The situation I find myself now in is as follows:

2 XP installations on the same partition. 1 let's me login and works fine (this would be the new installation), and I can find all the files that are on the computer but I would need to reinstall everything to make it work properly. The other XP is the one that keeps looping during login. The interesting things is that if I leave the login caption for a few minutes I can hear music/news readouts. This would probably be from a popup that's working in the background.

I would really like to get the old XP installation to work again and uninstall the new installation. Does anybody here know how?

Many thanks,

Bbow

PS: it's WinXP Pro SP3 (new install is clean XP, no SP)
 
Can you access the old copy of XP in Safe Mode? Might be able to scan/recover your XP partition by scanning it with anti-malware apps on your new installation.
 
Hi Zenosincks,

Nope, when I try safemode I get the same login-logout loop problem.
Haven't tried scanning the HD yet, will give it a go.
 
Just to give more info and hoping that someone out there knows what to do...

2nd XP is installed in Partition D: , 1st XP (the faulty one) is installed on C:.

I have tried expanding userinit.ex_ from the XP CD to C:\Windows\system32 but this hasn't made any difference, still the same problem.

I scanned the C:\windows folder with CC Cleaner but it wants to delete the WHOLE folder, so no luck with that.

Any ideas what else I could try? Adaware perhaps? Malware remover?

The good thing is I haven't lost any files so far....I think.
 
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