Why did I get THIS error?

[pointd]

I was called by a friend who informed me that he had been installing a new USB printer on a 3 month old XP Home machine and his PC had crashed. Total lockup, no mouse, keyboard, nothing. So he did a hard reset to be confronted by the message NTOSKRNL.EXE is missing or corrupt. Please reinstall a copy of this file. At which point he called me.

I went round and tried for myself and (fairly obviously) got the same message. So i thought OK, I'll boot from the CDROM with the XP disk in and extract the file from there. At bootup the BIOS said "Press any key to boot from CD" which I did and nothing happened. Error message again.

I then unplugged all things USB (he was installing a printer at the time the problem started), turned on again and the same thing happened.

I then unplugged the keyboard and the mouse (which I had already checked to see if they were seated correctly) so the only thing left plugged in was the power lead and the monitor, turned on and the machine booted straight to the login prompt no problem.

Plugged the keyboard back in, rebooted, no problem. Same for the mouse and the same for all his USB devices.

So - Any ideas as to what happened and why it would cause Windows to think that one of it's main files was missing or corrupted?

[glc]

USB = Unpredictable Serial Bus

[pointd]

LOL - That is now my quote for today.

[bailey]

you may need to download new support drivers for the printer from the mfg.'s web site for xp.