[Caspian]

I'm running XP Pro, English version.
I have an own-built system consisting of an AMD Athlon 1,33GHz CPU, Abit Socket-A mobo (can't remember the model right now), 768MB DDR RAM, a Turtle Beach Montego sound card, a GeForce2 MX400 gfx card, and two harddrives (one 80GB Seagate Barracuda and one 120GB WD Caviar) in case this helps understanding my problem (which I doubt).

I'll start by explaining what's wrong. When I start the computer Windows boots up quite normally, and I get to the logon-screen where I get to chose which profile to log onto (my girlfriend's or mine). When I click on one of 'em the logon screen disappears and the wallpaper appears like it always does. But that's it. Nothing more happens. No desktop, no icons, no taskbar or startbutton. Nothing. The computer stops accessing the harddrive so it doesn't get any further than that. If I press ctrl+alt+del the task manager appears (thank god) and through it I can se that many of my auto-started tasks have indeed been started. But there's no explorer.exe... which is bad. I've tried to start it manually through the task manager -> New Task (Run...) but nothing happens, and it still doesn't appear among the active processes. I'm clueless as to what to do about this.

I re-installed XP from scratch about a week ago. I deleted the previous installation after I made a backup of my (and my girlfriend's) profile in the Documents and Settings folder. I then installed XP by the book, patched it up completely, installed all the programs I normally use, recreated the profiles and tweaked everything the way I always do. So far so good.

A few days ago an error message appeared when I was logging on. I had just clicked on my user in the logon-screen and my wallpaper had just shown up when the message appeared. I don't recall *exactly* what it said, and I couldn't take a screenshot 'cos it hadn't finished booting up yet, but I do remember that it said something about a damaged registry-file and that a successful recovery from an older backup had been made. I have no idea what caused this error message, but whatever the problem had been it appeared to have been fixed so I didn't pay it much attention. I still don't know if it's related to my current problem or not.

The reason I reinstalled Windows last week was this very problem. I thought it was something of a freak accident, but now it's back, which suggests that something must be done, other than just reinstalling windows once again.

Does anyone have any clues?