WEIRD Dell Windows XP problem...

Hi Folks,

 

Got a strange one. A friend of my sons at college has an out of warranty
Dell pc running Windows XP. You boot the thing up and saying it comes up is
not quite accurate. It comes up with NOTHING on the Desktop. Just a big
empty screen. Does the same thing in Safe mode. I can do Ctl-Alt-Del and get
Task Manager and from there Applications tab shows NOTHING running. I can do
a New Task and run something from a CD. I loaded Ad Aware, Spybot,
Spyblaster, etc. and our antivirus software Sophos that way and then I can
use the same deal (New Task) to run any of them and they come up with
nothing. I have booted from a boot diskette and run a command line scan that
finds nothing. Tried reverting back to previous config, etc.

 

She said this has happened before and she took it into a local shop and they
reformatted her hard drive to "fix" the problem. She said it was OK to do
that again but that will be the 3rd or 4th time and there has GOT to be
something going on.

 

Any ideas ?

 

Thanks !

 

Chuck