The clue may be the SVCHOST items.
Light reading on these worms -> http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/blast.asp
Dell should supply a new OS CD with SP1 integrated and worm-proofed.
Bob
For some reason the forum would not let me tack on a reply to my first post Windows XP Will Not Boot Completely. So I am posting this anew.
Checked the error logs and there were many red x's, detailing various problems. Many of these were caused by services that would not load in safe mode, from the last 3 times we booted the computer. The most frequent other one, was about a driver failing to load. The drivers that failed to load in this case were one call FIPS, and another called PROCESSOR.
Went ahead and did a clean system install of Windows, since nobody had any better ideas, and the computer worked great for about 2 hours. The software we installed after windows was:
Windows Updates
NAV Corporate Edition
PowerDVD
Roxio 5 Basic
Palm Tungsten
Avant Go
ePocrates
Documents To Go
Microsoft Office XP
Office Service Pack 1
HP Photosmart P1000 Printer
Imagemaker 4800 Scanner
It was in between installing the printer and the scanner that we got the first error where My Computer locked up, just a white window with no icons, and
Explorer crashed. Waited to end program on My Computer window, and once it did we had a blank screen with just a mouse and the desktop background.
Did a hard reboot by holding in the power button on them machine, recieved error about having to shut down explorer.exe, and the option to close now or cancel. We waited for the bar to go across the screen.
On reboot, got to the welcome screen just fine, but at that pointm you click on the user's icon to login, the windows startup sound plays immediately but it stays on the welcome screen loading personal preferences for at least 2 mins, and when it gets into windows, there is a mouse, and the desktop background but nothing else. Scanner lamp warms up, just as before, but nothing else.
Hitting ctrl+alt+delete brings up the task monitor, and under applications, there is something a little wierd. SVCHOST.EXE is running like 5 instances, but system idle process is still = 99%. When I closed one of the svchost instances, nothing happened, so I closed another. At this point, explorer opened, icons showed up, and everything, but I got a message from NT/Authority about being shutdown in XX seconds, and a countdown, similar to the same effect the MSBlaster worm had on systems.
Guys I am at the end of my rope. I have put in a service request with Dell and described the problems, in case it is processor related or hard drive related or whatever, because the users machine is still under warrenty for another 2 weeks. But I would like to be able to fix it without having to go through that.
Again, any help would be appreciated.

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