My laptop is caught in an endless reboot loop. I can't think of anything that could have caused this. Let me set the mood: The day before I did nothing out of the ordinary; hopping some known-to-be-safe sites, like Ticketmaster, all with my Norton Internet Security 2004 and my Norton Anti-Virus 2005 working (I update them regularly), I opened no e-mails at all that day, and the laptop certainly didn't receive any sort of physical bump. And the next day this: (I know WindowsXP is "emotionally unstable" and prone to create it's own problems, but they are usually usually not this severe.) WinXP won't Start Normally (it stops right after the load-up screen is supposed to switch to the blue welcome screen) and it cannot start in Safe Mode either, or any variation thereof. In both cases it goes on loading for a bit, stops, and when it is about to bring up the next screen it turns blue and I see the following message for a half-second or two before it reboots. I photographed the message and typed it up here: STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SECURITY or it's log or it's alternate. It is corrupt, absent, ot not writable. Beginning dump of physical memory Physical memory dump complete. Contact your system administrator or technical support group fot further assistance. I have run all basic and some advanced e-Diag Tools tests like Harddrive, memory, processing and found no error. I would really like to get at my personal data one more time so I can either transfer it over the network or burn it with my USB DVD burner (CD burner is permanently broken). I really hope this problem can go back into nowhere where it came from. Anybody know anything about this?

very common problem http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315341/en-us MSI KT4AV-L AMD Athlon XP 2800 1Gb Crucial 3200 DDR 160Gb Seagate Barracuda ATI 256Mb 9600XT 16x DL DF DVD/RW 16x DVD ROM 9-in-1 Flash Media FDD

The problem got more complicated, to be continued in "General Hardware" thread "BIOS won't start|sys.config updated" #40575.