Well, I like to think I'm pretty good with computers, but today I'm stumped.

After clicking the "windowed mode" option in one of my computer game's video settings, my computer froze up. After doing a hard reset, my computer showed the Windows XP loading screen, but right before showing me the user selection screen, a blue screen pops up that says this.

Stop: c0000218{Registry File Failure}
The Registry cannot load the hive(file):
\systemroot\system32\config\software
or its log or alternate
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete.
Contact your system administrator or technical support group for assistance.

I've tried booting under last good configuration, as well as all three instances of safe mode, and debugging mode. All to no effect, they always crash.

I was able to install another copy of windows onto my machine and boot into it, and while I think I'll be able to salvage some data from the computer if worse comes to worse, I'd like to figure out A) how to get the original version of windows working again, if possible, and B) if there's anyway to gain access to the documents and settings portion of my harddrive from the original copy of windows, as right now it tells me I don't have access to it. Any ideas on how to accomplish any of this?

As to the failure:

http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org/how...air_a_stop.htm

As to Access Denied:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421