I've come across plenty of threads discussing this problem and after following everything that applies I am still getting nowhere so please, any help is very much appreciated. I know I had downloaded a virus, before i could do anything about it, i had to leave town and left my computer in the trusted hands of my brother, who in retrospect will should not have been entrusted with a rubber band. He said he removed the virus, but my computer runs extra slow and connecting to the internet is impossible. i have decided that recovering all the way to "out-of-the-box" is the best course of action, however, (and this is where the issue comes into play) when I go into recovery I get the blue screen, and only when i go to recover. i can boot up normally (with my extra slow addition of course) and have checked under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and found i'm operating using the default. I have a HP pavilion a562n and am running windows XP. I don't have any recovery CD's, and as far as I was told, there is nothing they can give me to go "over the top" as other forums mentioned except of course for me to send it to them where they can fix it in exchange for my left arm, first born, and my big toe. So to sum up, I can't recover, I can't roll-back, and I don't know if it's the viruses doing or if there was something deleted that should have been. I know you don't want to see a hobbling one armed father who lost his son to Hewlett-Packard because he couldn't fix his computer so please please anything will help. thanks in advance.