The blue screen of the XP saying "Welcome" stays there forever!

Yesterday I was playing CounterStrike Source when suddenly the game froze with the current game sound playing repeadtly. (That was usual, sometimes I restart the computer by holding the power button or using alt-tab and close the game with tas manager). So I hold the power button and then forcing the computer to shut down. Then I turned on the computer again. Everything was fine until when it reaches to the initial blue screen of XP where it says Welcome and sometimes in small letters:loading your profile....blah blah. And I tried again and it was the same, I tried to wait, I waited for like half hour and it stays like this. the "Busy" light does not flash.

I have lots of important files in the computer that I don't want to restore the whole drive, anything I can do to fix it?

My computer model is a SONY VAIO DESKTOP VGc-RA840G
I am using Windows XP Media Center THANK YOU!

Can you boot into Safe Mode?

Tap the F8 key after the BIOS POST but before Windows starts.

Do you have a Sony recovery CD?

Yes I do have, but it only wipes out the entire C drive.

I did press F8 but it doestn' let me go to a menu where there is Safe Mode, it only gives me a red window log that contains where do I want to access (i.e: CD-rom, removable disk, and Hard Disk) so...?

I had something similar recently.

I run xp pro sp2 1gb r.a.m. 1.80 ghz processor sepron 64 bit.

I would have welcome screen show up, then for upto 5 minutes it would then displayer pointer and my wallpaper then take an age to finally be usable after all notification icons were in their area.

It was NIS2007 causing the lag. I know this as I uninstalled it cleaned up my system and found it stopped.

Stopped as in went back to normal speedy startup.

It might be your firewall and/or av software causing this.

Uninstall it and see what it's like without it.

If it is the software, then either find a lower memory user firewall and av or reinstall it.

Norton I will always uninstall and reinstall every 1/4 as it does this.

I don't have norton installed, and my welcome screen never turns away :/ I think there is a system file which was corrupted, now the only thing i could do is restore the entire hard drive.

I would try Safe Mode again.

Be sure that the BIOS POST is over before you hit F8.

You can also slave this drive in another computer to extract your data before you reinstall XP.