From Cork to Toronto

One of several things I'm working on at the moment is migrating people from Windows XP to Windows 7. There's various ways to go about this but we are in the main provisioning new PCs and manually bringing the data over - I'd rather not use Microsoft's tool to bring settings as we often take this sort of equipment change as an opportunity for a bit of a fresh start, with bookmarks and documents being re-imported later. One particular PC (Dell Latitude E6420, BIOS A08) decided on the very morning it was to be replaced to stop booting, even in Safe Mode/Command Prompt. Diagnostics and a chkdsk /R found nothing. There were longer than usual delays to bring up an F12 (choose boot device) menu. We had a backup of the data on it but it wasn't fresh because the user had been away from the office for a time. It seemed to me to be worth having a go at to get a better copy. Booting to XP Recovery Console to try and knock out some services or drivers was abandoned because...

Have been struggling this morning with a Windows XP PC which was in a reboot cycle displaying the following error: STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error} The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000135 (0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down. God there's a load of crap on the internet - including in the Knowledge Base. "Do a chkdsk. Check the memory" which is all fine and well but it doesn't analyse the problem the computer is actually reporting (although Microsoft take 90% of the blame here for not properly publishing error codes.  More posts, including Microsoft, said "do a repair install" but that would have broken stuff I didn't want to break, and doing a re-image would have been inconvenient. Better to see if it could be fixed. Most STOP 21A errors point to issues in winlogon.exe and csrss.exe but the "status of 0xC0000135" was an important differentiator between those and t...