Problems with OEM XP Pro installation.
I was given two computers, belonging to a man who had recently died, in exchange for helping his widow out with some of his unfinished business. I am using the more recent of the two and planned to use the other one, via a local wireless network, to back up material from this one and from a couple of others in the house.
Once I had finished extracting the required information for the chap's widow and others I set to tidy the older machine's hard disc up a bit. There was a lot of material of a personal financial nature which I wanted to remove and a lot of other "noise" - a great deal of unwanted Norton, a pile of HP stuff which kept calling home etc. I'm sure you can imagine.
Well, I've been at it, little by little, for over a year and I seemed to be getting somewhere gradually and the machine continued to work perfectly. Anyone who has seen my previous posts asking for help here may have formed ideas about my computer competence but may rest assured that it is worse than it will have appeared!
The machine has an ASUSTek main board, 2Gb ram and about 128Gb HDD and the drive is now about 25% full.
Unfortunately, after my last episode of housekeeping, it won't boot completely. It all goes well and gets to the point where the desktop icons have all appeared and nearly all of the little ones along the bottom too (including Start and the clock) but then it stops and won't do anything more. The boot process seems to get to within just perhaps five seconds or so of satisfactory completion every time.
I have repeatedly started in safe mode and explored pretty well all of the obvious options which come up. Each time I do this it will allow me to take one step down my chosen route and then stops and I have to use the power button to turn it off, whereupon it will let me start it again, in normal or safe mode, and I'm perfectly free to reach the same point once more, but no further!
I think it's pretty clear that I've ditched something vital but I don't know what and I don't know what I can try next. Does anyone have any good (and polite) ideas, please?