[Saga Lout]

Here's a little thread of my own for a change.

The machine is a Dell Precision 690 running XP SP3, fully updated. For no apparent reason it failed to start in Normal Mode yesterday, flashes a blue screen and restarts, and resists all attempts to make that Stop Error Message stand still. It starts in Safe Mode with Networking and allowed MalwareBytes to load and scan, finding 35 treats in the Quick Scan, all of which were fixed and after a restart, found nothing else in the Full Scan.

The system will not allow Spybot or SAS to be installed, citing administrative policy but AVG finds nothing and HJT reports no strange activity since MBAM did its job. Event Viewer tells me Fips and IntelPPM failed to load on the Normal Mode startups and that could be the problem. I've changed the Start code from 1 to 4 in the Registry to no avail but am a bit squiffy about changing it to 0. Does anyone reckon there's merit in deleting those keys completely?

For whatever historic reasons, there are no SR points to which to restore and no-one in that office knows the Administrator password and without messing around with Dell RAID drivers, I can't even get to the Repair option.

Checkdisk promises to start on the next restart but does not. sfc /scannow cannot operate in Safe Mode - that's what I call safe!

Suggestions welcome, with thanks in advance.