They do not want to lose their data - the daughter is using this machine for
college course work and has not backed up recently.

Based on my past experience working with Dell tech support, they aren't
going to know how to solve this problem - they follow their script, which
eventually arrives at wipe & reinstall. Since it is a Dell, Microsoft won't
talk to us/them unless we pay them to help us fix their bug.

Your suggestion will not work unless you can logon to the system - the
problem I am reporting prevents that.

"Mary" wrote:

> You should advise the customer to contact Dell for free support. However, I
> found this off the wall suggestion in Help that might apply: Open Ease of
> Access center in Control Panel and click on Change Administrative Settings
> and uncheck Apply to all Logon.... Ease of access used to be called
> Accessibility Options. It sounds like the user inadvertently started one of
> those processes and I would go through them all to make sure.
>
> "wyocowboy" wrote:
>
> > A customer brought a pretty new Dell laptop w/Vista Home Premium into the
> > shop that is getting this error on bootup. Same error in Safe Mode & Last
> > Known Good Config. I tried taking the system repair option from the F8 boot
> > menu and did a system restore to the day before the problem occurred but get
> > the same error.
> >
> > I then ran Startup Repair instead of system restore and Startup Repair did
> > not detect any problems.
> >
> > Any ideas on how to fix this, short of a wipe and reinstall?
> >
> >