Win XP unsolvable mystery

Tough to explain so I'll get straight to it:
After upgrading a Dell computer (1.4GHz) from windows ME to Win XP everything went smooth and ran well for about a week with one small message box popping up at startup stating "unable to find dell keyboard mapping". If you just cancel out the system would boot normally with no problems. Attempted to remove the keyboard mapping from the add/remove programs wizard. Dont know if it was ever succesful because when I reboot the system now it comes up with the logon dialog box as normal but after the system boots completely up I am left with a desktop that shows all the icons with one major exception. All the caption information for the icons and for the programs tree is nothing but what seems to be ASCII characters. ASCII has invaded the entire system...hmmm...tried rollbacks to no avail. Help Please!?

 

Are you running Active Desktop or Windoze classic interface? If you are using the Active Desktop you could try using windows classic desktop and see if it makes any difference. Sounds like a font or display driver problem.

 

Sounds reasonable except its almost impossible to navigate to try and fix anything when you cant read anything. Even the right click on desktop is in ascii....might have to scrub disk and start from scratch....

 

Is it worth it to try and salvage this install? If it is, we can try an automated vbs script I found at MS. I have been testing and this script will run a restore point. It ran one on my computer.

But in order to do this I need to know how comfortable you are using the Black screen. That is no GUI.

First question is this. Have you tried CTRL+ALT+DEL New Task Button Applications tab. That's the tab on the far left.

That brings you to a new page. Three buttons on the bottom. The button to the far right is the new task button. Click it.

This will bring up a dialog. Type cmd.exe

Is that readable? If so, we can use it to get the information you need . If not, we are going to have to use Recovery Console. We need to be able to get some information. Namely the latest Restore Point name and the name of your computer. I will then insert that information into the script and upload it for you. You can then copy the script to floppy. Restart your computer again into Recovery Console. Copy the vbs file from the floppy to the start menu>Programs>Startup Folder.
(That's not the exact path. This is a broad outline)

Restart into Windows. The script will run. It won't take more than a few seconds. And you will have no idea when it has finished.

Shut down. The system Restore dialog with the progress bar will appear. When it is finished and the computer is restarted into Windows, you'll hopefully be back in business. But with that origianal problem. Upgrades often have glitches. I would have a look at the Manufacturer's site for any information on this as a possibility for your Keyboard troubles.

If all goes well, go into the Startup folder and remove the script so it won't run at next boot.


I have to sign off for a while. Let me know if you want to try this.

 

FDISK Run a full of install of XP , upgrades are not recommended, especially from Win ME

 

As true as the upgrade problems statement is, a clean install is always better, there may be files and folders on the drive which he might like to save before a fresh start.

 

I want to thank you all for the inputs. I decided to go with the tried and true method of clean install. I dislike to leave this mystery unsolved however I needed to get the system up and running. Since The most important files had already been backed up on cd's before the upgrade began this seemed the best direction to take....Thanks again.