Tricky Windows XP problem

[Quixoticism]

I'm trying to fix a computer for a neighbor who's windows installation stopped booting after his wife was trying to clean up some old programs. He said after she deleted something it locked up and now it freezes at the progress bar every time loading windows.

It boots into safe mode just fine and I found that getting rid of the video card drivers allowed it to boot normally. But then after reinstalled the drivers is refuses to boot again in the same manner. I'm wondering if there's a way to find the conflicting issue without having to do a full reinstall, as he has lots of work programs installed.

I want to try a repair first though. Do I need to be backing stuff up if I do that?

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[Krynn72]

What I would do next is uninstall the drivers again, make sure that it does indeed work. Then I would run a program called driver cleaner and make sure all traces of the driver are gone. Then reinstall the drivers and see what happens. If it is still happening, id try running windows repair off the XP CD. If its still happening then **** it, format and reload that bitch. Not worth the time and aggravation to delve much deeper into it.

Also, its always a good idea to backup data, regardless of what you're attempting.

 

[kdub70]

you can also try system restore in safe mode restore it to a point before whomever was deleting things.
if that doesn't work go with Krynn72's idea