XP nothing opens

Twinbird24

Twinbird24

Member
I have an XP Pro PC and I was doing some virus scans on it and then did a disk defrag, I also enabled automatic updates because they had been disabled for some time. The PC was running just fine then all of a sudden it started having problems: when I right click on the desktop the menu would be visible for a split second and then close right away, same thing happens when I click on the start menu, I also can't open any programs by clicking on the desktop shortcuts or the icons in the system tray.

I tried a system restore but that didn't help. Safe mode also doesn't seem to be working properly because I can't type anything into the box that appears when I click on Start > Run, I wan't to open up msconfig to change some startup options. I am able to open up programs through the start menu in safe mode.

I don't have any idea of how this happened or how to fix it.
 
1. system restore didn't solve it.
2. safe mode, you can't type anything in the run box.

Questions

Did you find any infections?
Were there any updates installed?
How bad was it fragged?
 
Thanks for the reply. I did find infections but I removed them all, there seemed to be a lot of things related to internet explorer (it wouldn't work before the virus scans but then worked after). Updates were installed (and I just actually realized this could be the problem but not sure how to undo the update) and the HDD was fragged quite a bit, it's a 20GB HDD and is almost full, there is about 1.34GB of free space left.
 
I have seen weird things happen after a defrag. How far back did you go on the system restore? With it only being a 20 gb hard drive, it has to be quite old. Its possible that something has screwed up on it and you need to run a drive diagnostic on it.
 
Thanks for the reply. I actually just selected last know good configuration from the F8 menu before Windows loaded. I will try to open system restore and go back to a time before the defrag. The problem did start happening right after I did the defrag, so that is probably it.

EDIT: Alright, I was stupid and had left two keyboards plugged into the PC and that's why one wasn't working, the keyboard issues is fixed now.

EDIT AGAIN: You know what, the second keyboard I had plugged in was face down and buttons were constantly being pressed on it, like the escape button and tab button, that's why I was having these strange issues. I feel so stupid now! I didn't even know the second keyboard was plugged in!!
Thanks for all your help though!
 
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