I have a relatively new installation of Windows 2000 on my computer. It booted just fine the first time. I downloaded and installing a few applications (ZoneAlarm, IE6, Firefox, Winrar) and rebooted the computer, where it promptly locked up solid at the logon screen. After a second reboot, I got the following stop error (Well, I'm pretty sure this was the error, because every subsequent reboot also gave me an error, and it took me quite some time to figure out how to prevent the system from automatically rebooting so that I could actually *read* it):
STOP: C00021A {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0x00000080 <0x00000000 0x00000000>.
I'm able to get into Safe Mode just fine, which I did. I quickly discovered quite a few programs and "services" that didn't belong, including a winlogon.exe in C:\Winnt\System, and several other phony services (Just my luck, I get hit in the half hour or so it took me to set up the firewall....). I removed them, and removed the entries for them (after performing backups of course), but I'm still having the same problem, and to be frank, am at a complete loss about what to do to fix it. (At this point, and with a pretty new installation, it'd probably be easier just to reinstall Windows, but I didn't recieve a recovery disk with the computer.)
Any suggestions? I'd scan the .exe's I removed for viruses if I could, but I can't get AVG installed under safe mode, and really don't know what anti-virus program I can use that I could do that with.