I have experienced the following problem on several different machines in our workshop over the last few months.
After performing a repair installation windows the user cannot logon without re-activation. If you say YES to the prompt the screen goes blank with just the mouse cursor showing. If you say NO to windows logs you off the user and back to the logon screen. It is possible to logon in Safe Mode but not Safe Mode with Networking
The common fact is the machines are XP SP3 (Home, Pro or MCE) with IE8
We have tried the repair install using SP2 & SP3 disks. We have tried re-installing IE8 in safe mode (activation uses IE) but this causes a series of “ordinal not found” errors
We have played around resetting the OOBE but as yet have not found the solution. We have spent many hours attempting to get round this licensing loop but have failed on each occasion. We invariably resort to extracting the customers data and restoring after a clean install but would really like to crack this one as we expect it to happen again.
We have two machines in this condition now and would appreciate any input whilst we have a small amount of time before we are forced to format and re-install to return them to our customers
Yours in hope
Stuart Waite
Border Computer Solutions