Windows Activation?

[fftaz336]

About 10 months ago I built a computer for a guy with Windows XP home. Yesterday he called me and said that it needed to be activated. He did not add any new hardware and only installed one program (Tripmaker 2001). He said he tried to activate WinXP but it just locked up on him.

I looked at it and it would go to the welcome screen and act fine. When you click the name to log in, it tells you that userinit.exe can not be initialized and logs you off, but the welcome screen only has the left side of the screen present. No users. Also there was no turn off computer on the left side.

I tried a repair and called Microsoft to re-activate with no problem. After the process was complete, it gave me the same error again (activation and three or four .exe and .dll errors as well as others). I did this three times with no luck.

I even tried recovery console, but that didn't work either. It wouldn't even let me into safe mode or last known good configuration.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[doctorgonzo]

You may want to check out the solution towards the bottom of the page on this thread: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Oper..._20972739.html

[fftaz336]

Thank you that fixed the problem. Apparently this is a common problem. Thanks again for your help.

[shifty]

I have the same problem.

[DragonNOA1]

Can someone post the solution b/c I cannot view it on that site. TIA

Edit*

I have just fixed this issue for a client with the same simptoms by doing the following: using ESD commander, I was able to edit the registry and change the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Userinit key from a garbled value his broadband provider's software set, to C:\WINDOWS\system32\Explorer.exe, for WinXPPro, home may have a different location for Explorer.exe, but this is almost always the problem with that behaviour. Re-installing windows is almost never necessary in this situation, changing the registry has worked the 5 or 6 times I have seen this problem.

If you have access to another computer to burn a disk, there are several options to modify the registry, such as http://sourceforge.net/projects/austrumi .. google is your friend here.

Good luck! This situation IS recoverable with a little work, without data loss.

-or-
Although I did a slight modification in his solution, to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Userinit i added "C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.exe," and not "C:\WINDOWS\system32\Explorer.exe,". Yes, including the comma.