Wife's laptop keeps restarting

[bill0527]

She turned it on last night and all it does is keep restarting itself. Its got Windows XP Pro w/service pack 2 on it.

I'm out of answers on how to fix it this time. Windows takes forever to load up and just before its supposed to pop to the desktop, it restarts the whole computer.

I hit f8 during bootup, went to options to disable automatic restart on system failure. Booted it again, it hit a blue screen with the error message - STOP: C0000221 {Bad Image Checksum}. The image Olethk32.dll is possibly corrupt. The header cheksum does not match the computer checksum.

I googled the error message, and it looks like I'll need to replace that file from the Operating System disk or do a reinstall of the OS. I go into the Bios, change the boot order so that the CD-ROM will boot up first, pop in the OS disk, and for some reason, the CD-ROM will not boot up and it goes right to trying to boot up again from the hard drive.

If I can't get the CD-ROM to load first, I think I'm screwed here because I can't reinstall the operating system, attempt to use windows recovery on the CD, or even get to a command line.

Is there any other trick out there I can try?

 

[Demon10000]

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=326687

This article refers to user32.dll, but you should be able to replace that with olethk32.dll in the procedure and follow it through.

If you don't have a bootdisk, I'd head over to bootdisk.com and download one from there.

 

[bill0527]

The laptop doesn't have a floppy drive

 

[rapperwith1p]

If you can, try disabling the ability to boot from the hd. For example set all entries in the boot order to the optical drive.