Won't Boot past Welcome screen

My Home PC froze up last night & it will now not boot past the Blue starting XP (splash) screen. It gets to this point & hangs. Attempted to start in safe mode, gets to mup.sys & hangs, one time it made it to the splash screen in safe mode but hung there as well. A big problem here is I have wiped out my system restore points Sunday after running some virus scans & deleting the files found. I also did not create a boot disk or back up of the items that are currently very valuable to my family (newborn baby pics) NONO.

Background,
XP Pro on Home PC - won't boot past splash screen after auto running a scandisk for corrupted files (due to cold reboot i assume).
Attempted to install zone alarm Sunday. ZA Failed to install saying could not shut down TruVector service. I then lost all connectivity to internet. Though, ZA did not install completely it did enough to block access & provided a connection error code which point to a firewall. Monday I read various posts of problems & noted which files to track down to remove & assure a clean uninstall of ZA. Did so, rebooted, & internet connectivity was back. I installed ZA from a new link & it worked great for about 30 minutes of surfing. I then downloaded, installed, setup, & ran SpyBlaster. I then began a BitDefender online scan & at this time I left the PC to have a talk with my son, about 10 minutes after I returned to find the PC stuck at the Splash screen. Assuming something went horribly wrong & it rebooted.

I attempted to boot using XP PRO disk & using R option did not seem to get anywhere it wanted a boot or backup disk which i do not have & seemed to begin to reinstall windows when i did not provide the floppy. I really would not mind wiping the HD & reinstalling XP to get rid of all problems & start fresh, but I am going to be in a sling for not backing up the baby pics if I cannot retrive. Sorry so long.....

Finally my question, I have read through all posts coming up with a search of hang up at start screen.
I found a link from surferdude2 to create a boot disk in here:
http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=43303&highlight=hang+start+screen but it is dead.

I also read another thread with someone hanging up after mup.sys loaded but there was no resolution.

Thread here http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=4582&highlight=hang+start+screen
found a link to repair windows master boot record, partition tables, boot sector, NTLDR file, but again it wants a boot disk. I attemtped to understand instructions on creating one on microsoft support but it's not making it's way correctly into my brain......


Which is the best direction to go here & if i do get a boot disk made, & can get into windows after using it, then what? will i be able to quickly copy the pics & move on from here or will i need to track down the problem & fix it before i am able to backup the pictures?


P.S. This site is great, in financial bonds as of now but i will be a donator when funds allow! Please note this is not the same PC i posted about last week.

 

For the safest result I would put the harddrive into another computer as slave or secondary master and take a backup of the pics, etc., there. In that setup you could run Checkdisk (chkdsk) on that drive, also antivirus, antispyware or any other utilities.

Once you have it backed up, return it to the original comp and try a repair or no luck, a reinstall.

Matt

 

thanks mattman. luckily i was able to reach my desktop & files. through another attempt at a repair installation with the cd.

it worked for accessing files, using winzip to back up onto cd's (for awhile), programs seem to run but no apps. i cannot access device manager, the system info from control panel, basically any windows app.throws run DLL as an app errors, & rundll.32 errors. no internet connection, probably from not being able to load a usb driver. can't load sound driver either. any windows app will open then throw an error. i'm just lucky we saved the pics. wish i knew what happened though....

will clean install windows later this week.

possible cause? i was messing around with the Users & Groups prior to this happening. Is SYSTEM showing as a User normal?

I installed the unplugnpray download as well sunday.