I had some viruses on the computer. I ran Symantec for 2:20. It told me to reboot. Now when I enter the username and password, it has the little dialog box that says Applying personal settings ... then it switches to Saving settings and puts me back to the login prompt. Is there anything I can do about this or do I have to reinstall server 2003

try repairing the OS ... that`s what i am doing at the moment because after i added something and got rid of a virus, it wouldn`t even start in safe mode ..

Repairing the OS would bring me into command prompt right? I'm not entirely sure how to do that one?

I had the same problem after a virus cleanup a few years ago. Here are the notes I kept after figuring out the solution. This behavior indicates a problem with userinit.exe There are two possible problems. 1. The file %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\userinit.exe is either damaged or missing. Use the Windows recovery console to replace it with another copy. 2. The registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon should have a setting named userinit. It may have been changed by virus or spyware. In some cases the original setting is saved under OldUserinit. The correct value for this key is "WINDOWS_PATH\system32\userinit.exe," Be sure to include the comma after userinit.