Windows starts the boot process it goes to preparing network connections then applying security policy then it just reboots and starts the process all over again. sometimes it makes is to next step applying personal settings, but then it will reboots again. All this started happening after a storm and the power flickered a little bit.

It sounds like a power surge fried something inside the PC. It's anyone's guess as to what it is. My guess would be the power supply but it's only a guess.

not usually the sign of hardware but a corrupt file system. After all you get all the way up in windows - almost. Go into recovery console and run chkdsk /f This will detect and correct file system errors. Imagine the power of knowing how to internet search http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Teachin...

Have you tried Last Known Good Configuration? Life's more painless for the brainless.

Can allso be a symptom of a failing RAM stick; if two or more present reduce to a single (min 128Meg) and see how it goes? Less likely - but not unknown; the drive is going down albeit slowly. The chkdisk routine may indicate significant drive errors... Should this appear to be the case then perhaps wise to backup (as in copy off to optical media - and verfiy they do play OK on this sytem - and one other if possible...) all crictical files etc; then replace the drive etc. You can either transfer present drive contents to new drive (a suitable util often arrives with a new drive) or start afresh...?

I also had a system hick-up and had to reload the complete PC, as I could not recover it and the last system backup is too old. I did not loose any data though. However the System is a procedure to setup again and will never be the same! With MS one needs 2 Boot Drives on every system, so you can swap to make an Image of the Boot Partition in case of such a problem! (There is no way one can MIRROR or BACKUP a life system!) The new OS was installed on another HDD. However now I have a problem to get back the previous settings for Outlook Express 6.0 and the eMail Address Settings (incl. message rules), as well as the Passwords from IE 6.0. Is there an "OFFLINE Registry Editor", which can read the Registry off the old HDD and extract parts there of? These could then easily be added to the life Registry. - I have already exported these settings before from another running (life) system and transfered it to another running (life) PC sucessfully, but not recovered from an inactive (offline) system. Does anyone know how to do this. I cannot load the old Registry, as a whole lot of things are non existent. Or could this work when I backup the current Registry then load the offline Registry in its place and restart the PC to grab and export what I need and thereafter replace the old Registry with the one I have backed-up earlier, to add the extracted infos. THANK YOU !!!