We recently got a Dell Dimension 2200 from my mom's friend. Now, whenever I try to boot it, it sticks at the welcome sceen, then goes to my regular background, but with no start menu or icons. I can open task manager and winlogon.exe is working, but i can't figure out the problem. I don't have an install disc so i can't boot from that, any help would be greatly appreciated. NOTE: If i need to get the disc, or send it to repairs, i will just load longhorn 5048 on it, though i would rather have XP.

In task manager start a new task and enter explorer.exe and see if u get in.

Will it work in safe mode? You might check the bootlog.txt file and get some clues, or the event log.

How do I boot into safe mode? I will try the 'explorer.exe' thing.

Hold the F8 key as your computer is booting. A menu should appear, choose safe mode. Hopefully you will be able to boot successfully into Windows (though with VGA graphics and minimal driver support). From there you might want to run msconfig and see what programs are loading at startup, one of them may be what is causing the trouble. You can get to the event log by typing eventvwr.msc into the run box. This may also help you figure out what is going wrong.

Are you running any kind of Antivirus ? Most start up problems come from either Hardware of software Issues , Do you have onboard vedio card or is it a pci or agp.. If you are running Antivirus, try removing it and see if it will still hang.

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