I picked up a virus somehow, not sure when, about a week ago; but it's gone now. It was some form of adware trojan, or the Vundo virus, causing pop-up alerts that mimic Windows Security Alerts and on mouse click direct the browser to xp-shield.com to download their 'registry fixing' executable - yeah right, arghh!

And hey, THANKS for telling me/us about free anti-virus software. I used Avast to finally delete the offending undeletable file, named crtpool.dll. But before i got that far toward success, I was experimenting with startup in Safe Mode, in the hopes I could delete the offending file when it wasn't flagged as "in use". To my shock and horror, my PC won't start in Safe Mode anymore!! It gives me this long apologetic message claiming "Windows failed to start successfully...", and "this may have been caused by a recent hardware or software change...", and "if you experienced a power failure during a previous reboot attempt" and yada-yada on. I'd like to paste that text but it appears before "text services" is running, y'know. Hey I tried "Safe Mode with Networking" and "Safe Mode with Comand Prompt" but still no go.

I have no idea when this problem arose. When I discovered the virus, one of the earliest things I did was visit Windows Update. I got and installed SP3 and IE7. But the virus survived all that. I haven't the foggiest idea when my PCc's Safe Mode quit working.

Please help me! I am at a loss. Is there no command possible from a running Windows environment to request "Restart in Safe Mode"? I simply held down the F8 key while booting.

There is no immediate ill effect, but I feel jumpy and insecure about not having a Safe Mode, yikes!

I'm running WXP SP3 on a modern capable system, not very complicated or overburdened. Need any other info, logs, dumps, files? If so, let me know.

Read here:

my computer won't start in Safe Mode - Google Search