What happen was I was running a program to get rid of some virus/spy-ware crap and at some point during the process it asked me about some stuff that the computer did on start up and I read it wrong I guess and disable a bunch of stuff that I thought was causing the problem, but when it finish and restated it booted up fine but when I clicked on my log in name it starts logging in and immediately logs out and I cant get past that welcome screen. I’m hopping I can get a reboot cd made and just do like a system restore/jump back or something but I don’t know? The second thing was install vista because I don’t have an xp cd and really don’t want to lose all my artwork, music, and movies. The problem with that is that vista wont just start running when I put it in and turn on my laptop, in fact it stops the boot-up process all together. Go figure so any help will do i.e figuring out that problem,. a way to get past that screen, put vista on there or at least if I can put like my hard drive in another laptop. It’s a Toshiba laptop farly old running windows xp service pack two with like 700 hundred ram, 30 something gb drive cd r burner nothing fancy but it used to get the job done “a classic” lol

lionelmac, seems to me you've hit upon the solution. Have access to a working system? Seems to me you could install your current HD in another system as a 'slave' long enough to retrieve your 'treasures', then do what's needed. HTH. Ed in Texas.