My fiance, Hughie, tried to boot up this morning and received the blue screen of death. He uses Windows XP Professional, and the error that popped up was this:

Stop: c000021a {Fatal System Error} The Session manager initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000022c 0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down.

Any ideas on how to solve this problem? He would very much like to not reformat his hard drive, as there are quite a lot of things he would like to keep on it.

Thanks so much,
Christina[/b]

if he can't do absolutely anything, then just try reinstalling without formatting.
If he has a way to do it, put his drive on some other machine to backup the stuff, then format and reinstall.

the problem is on his hard drive unfortunately

He can get on safe mode, but system restore does not work. He also does not have his XP software CDs.

The best thing to do is to borrow an XP Professional disk off a friend and use it to repair the system.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156669/en-us is a Microsoft Knowledge base on c000021a, read it and try some of the solutions and if that fails you'll need to borrow an XP Professional disk.

Blue screens like that are usually bad news. One thing that must be determined is whether it is either a hardware issue like a bad stick of ram or a software issue, virus, bum driver etc. I recommend trying to boot up into safe mode using f8. If it works then it is a bum driver and usually XP can be recovered at this point. If it is a virus, then its time to reinstall. I recommend downloading an operating system that can be run from a CD or DVD disk in order to help determine the problem.

A few options are Mepis linux, or knoppix. These will allow you to back up your files to a thumb drive or external Hard drive so that they may be carted to the next install. Just google knoppix or mepis to download them. Good luck

Copies of Xp are all over the net, there are ways of obtaining them fairly quickly, you know if one were so inclined.

well, when he got into safe mode, he ran AVG, his virus protector. It found Flooder.ake and we've traced it, through strenuous research , that it might actually be an error in AVG, a faulty definition. But when he tries to fix this, he's missing files that need to be altered. So we dont really know what to do. Also the file winIogon.exe comes into play, however he does not have this. He does have two winlogon.exe running in different places and we're wondering if that could be why his computer is being weird, cause it's trying to load winlogon in two different places....

but that last part is all me just thinking into my fingers. (aka thinking out loud for typing ) So i dunno.

pooh, i liked hughie

Hughie's awesome
i wish he manages to fix it soon

and the liveCD linux idea for trying to sort out what's going on is not bad at all.

Huzzah! It was in fact avg being CRAZY. XP + no service packs + non updated avg = ?!?! AVG decided winlogon.exe was a virus, when it wasn't, and so avg killed winlogon every time the computer tried to come on. I logged into safe mode, and uninstalled avg, and it let me reboot and now stuff works. I'm not rebooting anymore:P Thanks to everybody who tried to help or just showed concern over my leaving. Biggest thanks to feelgoodmordecai, my lovely fiance:)

welcome back Hughie!
*does a happy dance*

Why the hell doesn't your XP have any service packs or updates?

hey the man's back

Blue Screen of Death

I remember the time when I got them all the time. I think the memory wasn't plugged in properly.
Not that I miss them