XP: Login problem (possibly a virus?)

[downhillbiker]

Hey,

Just been round to my mates house to try and fix his computer, which has been acting up of late. Ran the usual virus checker/spyware combo, got rid of some IE hijacking nonsense, and rebooted. Now the login doesn't work...

It loads up fine, gets to the login screen, and when I clicked the username to login, it starts to load, pauses, and then logs out.

Any help is appreciated, as the computer is totally screwed at present, and he seems to be blaming me at the moment.

I can't try anything out, as the PC is on the other side of the country, so if you could just pile up some ideas, I'd be most grateful.

Cheers,
JP

[Kai]

Have you tried using safe mode? Or have you tried logging in as a different user - like maybe the Administrator account?

[downhillbiker]

Tried to get into safe mode, but it's not the standard key to force it to boot to safe mode from the prompt, so I need to find that out.

There are NO accounts that work, and all three accounts on the computer are set to admin.

[duke748]

something in startup perhaps or a corrupt profile - boot into dos mode or use ntfspro if you can't and try renaming one of the profiles under documents and settings.

Should be recreated at login

[downhillbiker]

I found out what it is... it's a problem with wupdate.exe and another file, caused by AdAware. Have to use the XP disc to repair the problem.

[IAmATeaf]

From another forum but it sounds like a similar problem:

"OK, sorted. It's a bug in Lavasoft ad-aware that deletes a file without altering a key, the key is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT
\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Userinit

It should be
C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe
But is probably
C:\WINDOWS\system32\wsaupdater.exe

as wsaupdater.exe doesn't exist XP hangs.

I solved it by going to windows\system32 and copying userinit.exe to wsaupdater.exe
then rebooting got it to work properly again.

Thanks for the input."