BleepingComputer.com: XP thinks it's in Safe Mode

Hello,

I searched the forum and did not find this issue.

I am running XP SP3 and ran several of the well known anti-virus/malware apps after the Vundo virus slipped by my resident anti-virus app and infected my PC.

Some of the anti-virus/malware apps required temporarily disabling System Restore and rebooting in Safe Mode.

The disinfection cleaned my PC successfully, but broke some services. For example, when I go into Computer Management and try to restart a service (like Print Spooler), an error message pops up saying "Cannot start service in Safe Mode".

The system is definitely not in Safe Mode, but some internal flag seems to say otherwise. Neither MSConfig nor c:\boot.ini indicates safe mode. The only suspicious thing I found was this registry entry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Environment\SAFEBOOT_OPTION (value = NETWORK). Setting it to other values does nothing; it simply resets to NETWORK after reboot.


Thank you!!!!!

Try sfc /scannow, you will need your xp cd. It may or may not fix the issue.

sorry - I should have mentioned in my original post that SFC is also broken:

"Windows File Protection could not initiate a scan of protected system files. The specific error code is 0x000006ba [The RPC server is unavailable.]"

<<[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Environment\SAFEBOOT_OPTION (value = NETWORK).>>

I find no such value in that key, mine ends with Environment (which reflects various values, no safeboot option.

Louis

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