Corrupt Vista Installation?
Hi all, I've been having some trouble with my installation of Vista today. It had been running without a hitch for nearly a year. I think the problem started since Windows was taking a long time to shut down, I assumed (wrongly perhaps) that it had frozen, and so I forced it to shutdown by holding the power button for 5 seconds. Another possible cause could be I plugged in a USB joystick (driver conflict?).
When I started my PC back up I noticed things seemed to be running very slowly at times, as if the system was having trouble accessing some files. I scheduled a Disk Check and restarted. It found and fixed some errors, brought me into my desktop, and then a pop up kept appearing in the bottom right tool bar saying '*.exe could not be accessed' and something about a folder named '$Secure'. My browser bookmarks wouldn't load, for example. I restarted again and this time during startup the green loading bar would run its course, and then a black screen and a cursor appeared, rather than the Vista logon screen. I booted off my Vista DVD and ran Startup Repair. It found and fixed some errors but I still have the black screen problem. I also ran another Disk Check, as well as some HDD diagnostic software - it said everything was fine. When I try running Startup Repair again, it tells me it doesn't see any errors and to remove any recently added hardware (I have).
I'm stuck at this point. I would like to repair (upgrade) my installation of Vista, but I need to be able to get into a working install in the first place to do that. Any ideas besides formatting and doing a clean install?
Thanks!
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