Has this happened to you?

[topnode]

Just want to know your opinions on what happened...

I'm running WinXP Pro.

Here's what happened.. i wanted to disable a process namely sm56hlpr.exe a little applet that came with my cheap 56k internal modem. my problem with the program is it had two instances on my taskbar alongside my mcafee vshield icon and other TSRs.

So i opened task manager, did a little eeny-meeny-miny-moe, highlighted one of the processes with the same name (sm56hlpr.exe) and clicked End Process...

Suddenly, the Blue Screen of Death pops out and i didn't give one second to read it (in hindsight it would probably have been helpful if i did read it..at least in trying to find out exactly what happened)

i immediately did a hard reboot (pressed the reset switch) and surprise! i get this terrifying message --->

ntldr missing
press any key to reboot (or something to that effect)

well i pressed a key to restart and did this at least 3 times with the same message coming up on the screen before i thought about shutting the PC down. (at this juncture thoughts of getting a rescue disk set and even reinstalling WinXP and all those programs flashed before my eyes).

then i booted up again with the same message, confirming fears that i had to do something drastic. But at that point of desperation (i don't exactly have all the time in the world to reinstall) a thought about giving it one more try and suddenly WinXP booted up no problem!

I restarted just to make sure... and it booted up without a hitch!

What happened? did ntldr get corrupted, did the boot process requiring ntldr get corrupted, did these get automatically repaired by XPs restore system even after multiple warm reboots and a cold start?

Who has a clear understanding of what actually took place?

Thanks to all the gurus out there!

[Dan]

'don't know what happened, best advice:
don't do the eeny-meeny-miny-moe routine....
could cause trouble you can't fix.....

[topnode]

Good suggestion Dan. learned my lesson.

Anybody else have an idea?

[mikeyr71730]

I have had things like that happen to me. Yes, corruption is possible. The file could have been restored somehow. And, I have to agree that eeny-miney-moe isn't a good thing for computers...

[mattg2k4]

I don't see what's wrong with the eeny-miney-moe method, I've done it plenty of time with no problems. I've even closed explorer.exe without a hitch. Could you do any damage besides freezing your computer?

[topnode]

well an example of the damage it can do is what happened to me. i nearly lost my WinXP boot program, w/c is a terrible thing to happen if your partition is NTFS...