Fixing Windows XP Pro, Eh?

I had a repair job this morning. A laptop was booting up fine, then attempting to login, and was immediately logging back out. Every user was doing this. Even in safe mode

Reverting to “last known good config” was no good

The trail to success started with various articles talking about the userinit key in the registry, and how some spyware protection programs can alter them. There was talk of replacing certain files with userinit.exe, but when i couldnt find said files, i didnt bother with that, but i believed i was on the right route

After a bit more digging i found the following: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/peboot.htm

This is the solution to the problem

In the effort to get to the solution i tried the registry tools in trhe Hirens cd, but only the Offline one would work, and this isnt very intuitive at all.

So BART PE to the rescue. I found that the “userinit” key was not present in the registry, so i created the string and all seems fine now