Black Screen with cursor on startup

[Dark Nova]

Well folks, I'm trying to fix my grandma's pc and I got a little problem

Symptoms: When you boot the computer, after the windows XP loading phase, instead of going to the user profiles as per normal, the screen comes black and you can see and move the white cursor. But you can't do anything else.

Things that I've tried:
1) Safe mode - same thing screen comes black with cursor
2) Safe mode w/ Command prompt - the prompt doesn't show up
3) last known config - same thing screen comes black with cursor
4) windows repair w/ SP2 - same thing screen comes black with cursor
5) check disk /p /r in recovery console using windows CD - had a lot of bad sectors and took me 2 hours to repair but it didn't solve my problem


I went to my local computer shop to see if they had a solution to solve that problem, apparently they had 12 cases of the same problem in the last week. That means it puts my problem in the same time span as the others.
I was at my grandma's place few hours before on the day the problem occurred, I remember installing a update for her HP printer. So I believe, because of so many people infected in such a short period of time, that its either a windows or HP update that is causing the problem

The guy at the local computer shop has no solution to this problem other then re-installing windows.

Things I haven't tried yet:
1) I can always try to manually recover the registry using the the recovery console, using this guide line - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
2) Take her hdd put it in my system to save her files and re-install.

Any other suggestions? Did you guys have to deal with this problem?

[glc]

check disk /p /r in recovery console using windows CD - had a lot of bad sectors

Replace the hard drive and reinstall everything. You may be able to recover files from the old drive slaving it back in or using a USB adapter. You CANNOT "repair" bad sectors - all you can do is lock them out, and when you start getting bad sectors, they WILL spread.

[Dark Nova]

Hum..
I find this very weird that everyone got the same problem at the same time, could the update create all those bad sectors, apparently at the local computer shop, all they're doing is reloading windows and it seems to work fine afterward

[glc]

If that's the case, fine. However, I'd run manufacturer's diagnostics on it after reformatting and before reloading.

[Dark Nova]

Well good news, I followed the registry repair guide line, and its back up 100%
no errors on the hdd, nothing
I don't know what caused this problem

But if you guys happen to have the same issue follow this guide line:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545