Major crash... need some help...

[Siberian]

System locked up, can't reboot, keep getting error message at boot-up that says

"winlogon.exe- Bad Image
The application or DLL C:\windows\system32\shlwapi.dll is not a valid windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette"

I have tried booting into safe mode, and rebooting with the XP disk and this error keeps coming up. I can't get into safe mode.


Any ideas on how to get around this?

[AfricanCaneKing]

it might be time to re install windows, when things get that bad it usually means you have corrupted critical system files. if you have windows 98 you might be able to find "shlwapi.dll" on the install cd and expand it into your windows directory, but there is no guarantee that will work. if you have win xp, try and use system restore to restore the system to a date before the problem started showing up.

once again the best thing to d is wipe clean and re install everything from scratch

[cyrick]

Did this happen to occur shortly after a Service pack or web based update? There are a few options before you start over.

Can you boot the CD room and get to the setup screen?

[Siberian]

It's Windows XP. I have inserted the XP disk and booted from the CD rom. I got to the repair utility, but I'm not quite sure what to do from there. **now checking microsoft website support for help**

[KingFish]

Do not go into the "repair" or "recovery console" from booting off the XP CD -

Follow instructions as though you were going to do a fresh install - then AFTER you've hit F8 agreeing with their licence, you select the partition to install XP on, (where your current installation already is) it will detect a previous version of XP, and give you the option to just repair that installation, Choose that option.

You won't loose any of your files, or personal settings, it's way easier to repair windows this way then by hitting "R" after first booting off the XP CD.

[Siberian]

Okay, I did it that way... Except it re-installed Windows, even though I hit "R" for repair. Oh well, no biggie. It's fixed now. I just need to go back in and re-do all of my personal settings, and disable all the useless crap in XP that I wasn't using.

[Allen Hallada]

Okay, I did it that way... Except it re-installed Windows, even though I hit "R" for repair. Oh well, no biggie. It's fixed now. I just need to go back in and re-do all of my personal settings, and disable all the useless crap in XP that I wasn't using.

Hea hea,
good answer.

Allen