Can't get past the splash screen

This is a Compaq presario that belongs to a coworker. He tells me he installed a free game of some sort. When he rebooted, the WinMe screen came up, and the harddrive grinds on with no progress. I brought the computer home and attempted to get into Safe Mode, hoping to uninstall that game, and hope for the best from there. Holding F8 brings up 4 options: Normal, Logged,Safe, and Step by Step Confirmation. The first 3 accomplish nothing-the WinMe screen comes up, and the harddrive grinds on(No safe mode). I gave it a full 4 minutes with no progress or change. Using the Step by Step option, after the 3rd step: Enable Smartdrive disk cache, chosing Y of N makes no difference as the response is as follows: Loads and initializes IFSHLP.SYS driver-then shows: Please wait while setup updates your config. files. This may take a few minutes... Then the following two lines repeat ad infinitum: Windows could not upgrade the file %1 from %2. Line 2: %1:%2.
I tried using an Me CD to boot the system. It talks immediately of a Win Me emergency boot,loads some CD drivers, goes through the scandisk routine-found and repaired some errors. Setup then initializes, scans the registry, and begins to copy files needed for setup, at which point I see a black screen with the hourglass in the center. I hear the CD drive slow down and become silent, and there the computer sits. It sits there inactive during the considerable time it took me to type this. I have a Win98SE boot floppy.
I see that there is a C: and a D: drive, inaddition to two CD rom drives. I imagine D: is Compaq's recovery partition, but I have no clue about accessing it from within the DOS environment, other than just looking at it's content by typing DIR.
Anyone willing to help?
Thanks,
Vic

 

Go to Bootdisk, and get the file for WinMe OEM. Double click this file with a floppy in the drive, and a "Win Me emergency boot" will be created.
Boot the computer with it or 98, choose Command Prompt Only, do this command at the A:\>.
ren c:\windows\wininit.ini wininit.old
Take out floppy and try to reboot. That file is what is trying to up 'update' something, and is only acted upon if it exists. My command renames it so it doesn't get called up.
If you do get into Safe Mode, use System Restore to get the system going.

 

Bootdisk

Thank you so much, Markp62. The renaming of the ini file worked!
I rebooted, and it came up successfully. I did not run a System restore as it booted successfully into the normal mode. Thanks again.
Vic

 

Thanks for posting back that it worked for you! You can delete that file at your leisure. I am sure you do not want it.
By the way, if you are ever curious when you see the 'Please wait while setup updates' message as to what was done, look for the file Wininit.Bak in the windows folder, and open it with Notepad.
When windows processes the file Wininit.Ini successfully, it is renamed to Wininit.Bak.