I have seen other people on this board with somewhat similuar problems, but not exactly having the same exact one. This morning my computer froze so I did a manual reboot (holding down power for about 7 seconds). When I restarted my system, it loaded past the welcome screen to the main screen but it did not load the desktop. I can access My Taskbar by going Control>Alt>Delete and open a program by browsing under a new task. This way I disabled my sound card so I can run chkdsk and ran chkdsk, it took an hour and a half to go through the entire process and I thought I would finally get my desktop back. Nope. If I try to start the system in safe mode, I don't get anything either. I do get the choice of Administrator and my name and then it gives me the Yes/No option but nothing more. I can get on the internet through the task bar but I cannot open another program, only one at a time. I tried to locate accessories to do a system restore but it's not available. Only Entertainment and something else is available under that option. Can anyone help? No matter what I've done I cannot bring up the desktop but I know things are loading since I can get on the internet. What was I doing when my computer froze? I was installing some software to make DVD labels. It just stuck on 5 seconds left forever so I shut down the system.

I'm sure you'll get other suggestions but first off Hold down the F8 during boot and when the "DOS" menu comes up select "Boot using last known good configuration"

I tried that one about 12 hours ago. That doesn't work either.

can you boot into safe mode and roll it back to a date when it did work ? failing that boot from the XP cd and repair the installation

When I try to boot it in safe mode, I get a black screen with Safe mode on it in the corners. The screen is completely black just like when I load it normally. Is there a way to do a rollback through the task manager? I don't understand what else you're telling me to do. I should use the XP CD to repair it? I have a Dell so it's a resource CD but I've always heard it's a bad idea to use the install CD for repair. Will that erase all my information?

Try booting to the xp cd,choose R, and run chkdsk /r from recovery console

Okay, I did this and ran chkdsk, again and I reloaded and still have the blank screen. I am very limited on what I can do now, my task manager is freezing up all the time. I hate to sound like a pain but can somebody actually tell me how to fix this problem before my computer is completely gone? I would like to fix this, not keep making it worse. That's all this stuff is doing. All I get is "Not responding" errors now. It took me 10 minutes just to get here and type this up.