XP registry restore?

[msolheim]

I got a call from a friend who's HP machine won't boot up. Unfortutunaly she's not much of a computer person so she can't tell me what type of machine it is othe than its an HP and running XP. She boots up and it goes through the HP splash screen to the Loading XP screen, back to HP, back to XP screen and stalls. She says she didn't install anything or uninstall anthing the night before this happened but a week or more before her brother went through and removed spy ware using spybot and some other program I've never heard of (not Ad-ware).

Is it possible to have her boot to a command prompt and restore registry backup from the day before things went wrong? If so how does she do that. I've search a bit but I guess I'm not using the correct terms.

thanks much.

[Statica]

Ask her to try booting to safe mode and running a system restore.

[msolheim]

had her try safe mode but it wouldn't load, just sat at the XP screen.

[Statica]

Check out this article on how to recover from a registry error: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

[Ob1]

i had a similar issues with a pc, and followed the recover from registry error article by m$ but i couldnt get any of the commands to work. so i ran a chkdsk from the recovery console and it fixed a slew missing or corrupt files, and the system booted back up with no problem.