dustybin

Good luck, cookaboy! Open a new thread (as advised) if you've not this problem resolved already...and be patient! ;)

Firstly an apology to all who have helped and offered support and advice. At the recommendation of my wife, after I became unable to respond to replies when the owner of the laptop I had been borrowing needed it back on Friday morning, I have had to cut my losses and get an engineer to "wipe" Windows and reinstall it for me. You, and others elsewhere, have been of valued assistance to me, and now that my problems have gone I didn't want to leave this thread hanging. Thank you!

When I plug the USB stick I have into the PC, the PC is not detecting it. I have checked the USB stick into this laptop that I've borrowed and am posting on and it works fine, so why can't the PC detect it? Because of this failure by the PC to recognise the USB stick it's not practical for me to follow the above recommended steps at this stage is it, as I can't post the results?

Before I burn this OTLPE to disc, if I use then use this newly-created disc to boot my PC, will it affect any documents and settings on there? I don't want to lose my photos or documents plus I have a whole heap of music on there (over 7000 songs).

It's getting on for midnight now, so I may have to leave the boot from CD stage until tomorrow. I've downloaded the ISO Burner and the OTLPE but have gone no further for now. Sleep time for me! Thanks for your help...for now! :)

OK...trying this now...

As the PC wasn't recognising the memory stick, I have save the exehelper to disc and inserted that into the PC. I can open exehelper, but it won't run. I get this error message :- dwwin.exe - Entry Point Not Found The procedure entry point SHRegGetValueW could not be located in the dynamic link library SHLWAPI.dll What's all that mean in English and how can I get around/over/past this, please?

I downloaded the exehelper and saved it onto the USB stick. When I connect the USB stick to my PC, however, the latter does not recognise that it's connected. What have I done wrong? :(

I've now got the memory stick. Going to try your advice now. Thanks :)

No -but I can borrow one in about an hour's time.

Sorry for the delay in responding - have had to wait to borrow this laptop I'm using again. To answer your 2 questions; yes and no. I can now boot into Windows but cannot open Internet Explorer. I get the iexplore.exe message that I posted above all the time.

Right, I've (sort of) managed a repair installation using the instructions from Armageddon above. I did get a few error messages as I went through especially towards the end. These were :- - rstrui.exe - Entry Point Not Found The procedure entry point RemoteAssistancePrepareSystemRestore could not be located in the dynamic link library WINSTA.dll - Windows Update An error occurred loading "C:\WINDOWS\System32\inetcomm.dll" The file may not have been installed or it has been corrupted. - Windows Update An error occurred loading "C:\ProgramFiles\OutlookExpress\msoe.dll" The file may not have been installed or it has been corrupted. - iexplore.exe - Entry Point Not Found The procedure entry point SetDllDirectoryW could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll - iTunesHelper requires WindowsXP SP2 or later. Please make sure compatibility mode is disabled in the Compatibility tab of the proprties for iTunesHelper.exe I don't understand what any of that technical lingo means, but am I right in thinking that what I need next is XP service pack 2 from a disc? I did have SP3 installed; do in need both SP2 and SP3 on discs as Armageddon warns not to try to connect to the network (does that mean the internet?) without having installed service packs, but hasn't mentioned SP3 by name?

So the first thing I have to do is disconnect from the network, but which network and how do I do this?

The first step seems to be to make a backup copy of my files - how do I do this please?

Do you mean the Repair Installation instructions you posted earlier?