I’ve just had a problem with an XP machine not letting users log in. It loaded to the user selection screen at which point you can log-in but it only flashed the screen and told you it was saving personal settings and returned to the user selection screen. Booting in safe mode gave the same result. It was impossible to actually get into windows to attempt to fix the problem.
A bit of research pointed towards a malware infection which was unusual in that malware normally wants something from you in the form of advertising revenue, money for dummy spyware removal or personal information. The days of the old Chernobyl viruses which would literally try to take your hardware out appear to be gone. However in this case it looked like malware at work. I found reference to some malware which changed the registry entry for userinit.exe, a key component of the windows startup procedure, pointing it to an alternative, infected process. I therefore needed a way to access the registry to change this entry back to the correct executable.
Continue reading ‘Windows XP Won’t Login, Logs Straight Back Out’
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me to look at his daughter’s laptop. She had changed her vista password and then managed to forget not only the new password but what the hint she had set even meant! So she had a laptop she couldn’t access with her school project work needed in three days and no backup. I didn’t hold out much hope apart from reinstalling Vista. There was no recovery disk for the Sony laptop so it would have been a fresh install and a case of hunt-the-driver to get it all working again, hopefully leaving her data intact.
Since a lot of my posts have sections of commands or code in, I wanted an easy means of highlighting a block of text within a post without using the quote block which I want to reserve for actual quotes. I found Stephen Cronin’s 
I was trying to install Microsoft SQL Server Express onto a Windows 7 machine today and when I got to installing the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express package I kept being prompted with the following error message:
One of our companies is a reasonably heavy user of Sage Line 50 and I’m amazed how much it has slowed down in the last year and the key seems to be it’s database back-end. I don’t know what Sage use but I wrote a Management Information System for the company to give salesmen a history of a quotes, orders and invoices which accesses the Sage files through Sage’s own ODBC connector. When I first installed the system at the beginning of last year, it took 2-3 seconds to load a customer’s history. It now takes over 20s!
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