Severe Login Problem

Hello all.

XP has recently given me a very bad login problem- no one can login. And I mean no one- administrator, local guest, any other user. The machine is on a domain , and no users can logon that way either. It goes like this:
Enter username&Passwd
"Loading you settings "
"Applying your settings "
"saving your settings "

and back to the login screen. Its that way for everyone. I even tried adding a user to the domain(who has never logged before) and logging in on the XP machine, still no luck. Any variant of safe mode gives the same problem. Last known good config won't work. I would check the event viewer & run sysrestore, but I can't even get in to do that. To let you know this is about the 5th time this has happened on the machine, and each time the only thing I could do was format it and reinstall. But i'd really like to actually fix it this time, rathe rthan just start over. The machine dual-boots with windows 2000, so any file deletion/restoration can be done that way. The problem has happene on windows 2000 before as well. The domain server event log doesn't show anyhthing out of the ordinary.
Does anyone know what is happening? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

Two suggestions (and more if these don't fix you up)

- Boot to the recovery console and run chkdsk /r on the system drive.

- examine the event logs from another PC. Should do fine even with this one at a logon screen. You may find a clue or two that way.