Can anybody help me with this. I seem to have a disconnect in my XP identity/settings. This is what i find: XP boots fine - I get to login screen which shows two identities, me and my wife. I login and find the first issue = loading had taken perhaps 10 second or so, now close to two minutes. When done loading, I am logged under my self, but eveything is scrapped as though its the first time i am entering XP (including a little prompt at the bottom right that suggests i "take a tour of XP"). Every program i open from there, it's as though it's the first time; I am asked to register and in the case of the Outlook express, i have to resetup each email account. I find my desktop and "mark's documents" under my computer now empty. My wife documents are fine. But that's where it's really funny... I can still access most of my files still entact by going through "documents&settings", I find myself, and my favorites, desktop files, "mark's documents", etc. all intact there. So I know my settings still exist on my computer. But they are somehow disconnected. At this point i've run all the windoctors and fixit stuff i've got. But ofcourse all to no avail, any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks, mark s s

Sounds like a registry crash that resulted in a "new mark" being created... When you browse through my computer to c:\docs&sets folder, do you see two Mark folders, one possibly having an extension after it, and one without an extension? If so, you can just move all the documents from the original to the new mark folder, and in outlook express you can change your mailbox store to the old folder to get all your old emails back, etc. That's the first step though - browse to that folder and see if there are two "Mark" folders.

Thanks matt, i checked and found the following: There is only one "mark" - but there are two "temps" and one hidden "default user" that I can't necessarily say i've seen before. (along with ofcourse one for my wife, "administrator" and "guest") I also tried to login as my wife, only to have the computer promptly go blue, before quickly rebooting. any other help?