Colin said:
Yes, I did say that I had tried safe mode. Unfortunately, I was unable to
logon.
<snip>
And what does I was unable to logon mean? Does the Administrator account
show up on the Welcome Screen in Safe Mode? Do any accounts show up?
I have no idea what the "live timing" is or what effect it might have. How
did you recover from the corrupt registry the last time?
As to your other question, no there is no simple file edit you can do from
DOS to fix this.
Have you tried the password reset utility that nightowl referenced?
Here is an article with info on how to recover from a corrupt registry that
prevents XP from starting
How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry that Prevents Windows XP from
Starting:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=307545
How to Troubleshoot Registry Corruption Issues
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=822705
Do you have a full backup of important data? If not do that first. That
can still be done even though the system won't boot. Here are some ways:
1. Take the drive out of the computer and attach it through an appropriate
adaptor to the USB port of another Windows XP or 2000 computer. It should
read the drive ok, so you can copy the data. A variation of this is to put
the drive in an external drive enclosure and connect that to the other
computer.
2. Create a bootable Bart's PE disk, boot from that, then copy the data to
external USB drive or flash drive.
3. Download a bootable Linux distro called Knoppix. Create a bootable CD
from that, boot from it, and copy the data to USB drive or flash drive, or
if the computer has two CD drives, one of which is a burner, then use the
k3b burning program on the Knoppix CD to burn the data to CD.
4. Take it to a competent computer tech to backup the data.
If the system still isn't booting then the next step is to do a repair
install:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
And if all else fails a clean install:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html